When something is dated in your home, you either love or loath it. Sometimes the piece can look modern or classic, unfortunately I thought our 70’s brick fireplace with a brass surround directly in everyone’s view was an eye sore. It is a wood burning fireplace, and we use it often in our cold Minnesota winters. Durability of material and paint was a must! We looked into whitewashing, tiling, stoning, paining, and any other crazy thing we could find on Pinterest or houzz. This isn’t a small area and recovering it would be upward of 3,500. Paining or whitewashing it was very intimidating, I mean….what if…was a disaster?? 
The first thing we did was take the brass surround off ( outside for ventalation) and spray painted it with rust-oleum high heat spray paint, It turned out perfect! { I will mention it has been 3 years, we use our fireplace in the winter and we have not had to do any touch ups! You can see it’s scratched a little from using the poker to open, but not noticeable.}
What did we do after all the searching? We hired a local painter that had done one on a smaller scale with artist brushes….I am not kidding. This is a huge area, and goes around the corner of the room. (There is another side in our office also, but we have left that since no one really goes in there.)
He used Benjamin Moore paints, 6 colors to make the variation to look “real” and to mimic our tile my husband had recently added to dress up our blah 70’s built ins. He first painted everything a neutral color, even the grout. I thought, maybe we should just stop here….it looks fine. It was so nerve racking to watch as the outcome was unknown! What would we do if we didn’t like it after all this time and money, not to mention his talent!
This talented man spent DAYS painting each brick, stepping back every so often to check and make sure it looked natural and there wasn’t a obvious pattern. It was awesome to watch the progress!
outcome= happiness. It was a perferct upgrade without spending a fortune or dealing with a huge mess of reconstructing!
EVER yours,
Katie Brown
Blended Aesthetics HAS moved!!! 
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