Yep. We gave up.

You know that we have tried to restore our brick fireplace. You know, the one that looked like this when we moved in:

But despite coming a long way, we hit a wall when we realized that even with our most hardcore attempts at scrubbing brick (part three of this adventure) didn’t yield the results we wanted.

We lost all motivation on the fireplace. Also, we were really sick of scrubbing brick. So we stopped for a long time. And when we came back, we finally admitted defeat. We have decided to paint it.

I know what you’re thinking:

Wait. You told me NOT to paint my brick.

I know, I know! I did say that you not to paint brick. Yet here I am, in the year of our lord 2018, saying that I’m going to paint our brick. So what changed?

Once you paint brick, you can’t go back.

First: the brick was painted before we got here. Once you paint brick (especially very rough textured brick like ours), you can’t go back.

So although I still think painting brick should be carefully planned, our brick was already painted. It can’t be reversed. So we’re leaning in.

The “whitewashed” look doesn’t go with the rest of what we got going on, style-wise.

When we first stripped our fireplace, we really had no idea how the rest of our home would come together. We didn’t have a vision for it.

When we restored all the wood doors and built a new oak mantel for the fireplace, the brick was obviously sticking out like a sore thumb. That’s when we knew we needed to make a change.

We don’t like whitewashed brick.

We know that some people love the look of whitewashed brick. We don’t.

Because someone made the decisions to paint the brick, our brick fireplace will always look whitewashed unless we hired a professional to remove the paint. This is not where we want to spend our time or money, so the

The winning paint color for our fireplace: Iron Ore

We decided to go dark and we settled on Sherwin-Williams’ Iron Ore. It’s a well-balanced dark gray that has a little bit of warmth to it, so it doesn’t feel stark or cold.

We’ve already painted, and we’re very happy with the final product. And all the time we spent stripping paint wasn’t a waste in the end. By removing all the paint prior to repainting, the texture of the brick shines through the new paint.