Heat up that ugly old fireplace
A hearth-warming makeover can be as quick or as involved as you want it to be
Q: For four years, I have lived with my husband and two daughters in a 1990s townhouse that has a dated gas fireplace with black and brass. We’ve always hated the brass and I thought the only thing I could do was have the entire thing replaced. When watching your show, I saw that you had changed a fireplace that is identical to mine. Spitting image. We loved the makeover. Can you tell me what to do? I’m trying to get all the to-dos off my list before school starts. A: Though it wasn’t a major reno, the fireplace in the photo shown did get a serious overhaul. I’m not sure that you can complete the project in a week, unless you have a great handyman at your beck and call. But you can definitely make what you have look better in just five minutes.
Painting the brass on your fireplace surround will make the biggest — and cheapest — change. You can likely remove the brass panels, take them outside and spray them with a coat of barbecue paint. There are fireplace paints in shades of grey and white that you can order online, but if your fireplace insert is already black, then black barbecue paint will work best.
If the brass panels are not removable, you will need to add time for covering the mantel and floor, as well as moving your furniture and perhaps even building a small spray booth around your fireplace using cardboard and sheets of plastic. I’ve made a booth with plastic sheeting and even worn a garbage bag (uber glam!) as a smock. What I’m getting at is that spray paint will go everywhere, so make sure you cover everything carefully.
Depending on how far you want to take your fireplace makeover, the next step would be to add a marble surround or beef up the mantel with new trim. The trim that you see in the photo above is actually MDF door casing (closest to the insert) and baseboards around the perimeter of the mantel. Our contractor, Real Landriault, mitred the corners of the mantel. To mirror the stepping of the trim, he used two pine boards — a smaller one on the bottom and a larger one on top — to make the mantel top. If you add trim to your mantel, you will feel like you have a brand new fireplace.
A marble surround, however, will give your fireplace a luxe look. The marble surround you see in the photo was already there. But to make one you’ll need to have three marble pieces cut, to between 10 and 15 centimetres wide, depending on how much space you have. The cost for the marble pieces is about $500, but sometimes you can get lucky and find offcuts.
I will leave you with a few fireplace makeover tips. Painting the mantel the same colour as the walls is a DIY job. Building a new mantel is not a DIY job, unless you are super skilled with a saw.
The windows you see surrounding the fireplace in the accompanying photo are pretty common in ’90s townhouses. Hopefully you don’t have these weirdo windows that make the fireplace look fake. But if you do, to make them disappear, cover them with simple roll shades in the same colour as the walls.