Fireplace Transformation

We finally finished a project that I can share with you!  Over the last few days, in between painting every wall in the house, we've been bringing our fireplace back to life.  Here's what it looked like when we started:

The first thing we did was remove the gold insert and clean out years worth of ash and dirt.

After the clean out

All of the ash that I shoveled out.  I'm pretty sure it had never been cleaned before.

After lots and lots of scrubbing, we finally realized that it was just too stained to survive no matter what cleaning products we used.  I was initially a little sad because I really liked the dark brick color, but nonetheless it had to be painted. 

The first step in painting a fireplace is priming the brick.  You can get masonry primer for this, but the nice people at home depot said that regular primer would work fine if we already had it (which of course we did), we just may have to do a couple coats to hide the stains.  This was after the first coat, but it only ended up taking two.

Next, we painted the wall a nice warm brown tone, only slightly darker than the walls in the hallway, living room, and entry way, and tested out a cream color for the final coat on the fireplace.

After all of the hard work and back and forth feelings about painting the brick, I am thrilled with the end result!  It makes the whole living room look more modern and the fireplace is a beautiful centerpiece for the room. Now all that's left is to replace that gross tile! (coming soon!)

What do you think of the transformation?  Are you of the mindset that brick should never be painted, or is it ok if there's no other way to save the integrity of the fireplace?

Before

After