Our Kitchen Fireplace Makeover Two Years in the Making!
Our New Orleans home has four chimneys throughout the house, adding charm with their century-old brick and function with mantels for decorating and storage. Each of them is in the center of our shotgun double, so back when they were operable they would have historically served two rooms, one on either side of each towering brick pillar.
When we toured and purchased the house, three of the four fireplaces were covered with either paneling or paint, with the flues sealed by a dated and low-quality tile. None of them were living up to their potential, and the biggest offender by far was the kitchen fireplace. While it was clearly the most structurally impressive fireplace in the house—large, open on all sides, and surrounded by a wraparound mantel—it was painted the most depressing shade of brown we could only describe as “Low Fat Chocolate Pudding.” It was one of the first things we knew we’d have to change when we bought this home in 2020, and well, considering the several grueling steps it required, it’s one of the last projects we felt like tackling. But once our kitchen renovation was done, we knew the fireplace needed a solid makeover to match the grandeur of our new cabinetry and countertops.
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Last year I had the energy to perform the disgustingly terrible task of chemically stripping and sanding the entire chimney—creating a cocoon of plastic sheets to keep the dust and other crap out of the rest of the house. I wore a heavy-duty respirator and for three days just crawled up and down a ladder to make sure every inch of the eleven-and-a-half-foot chimney was no longer covered in Low Fat Chocolate Pudding Brown. After clearing off every bit of the offensive paint, I sealed the brick with Thompson’s Water Seal, and then we took another year or so to work up the will to finish the project.
Hair color post-sanding the bricks!!! Courtesy of dust.
When it came time to finish the job, we dove back in by polishing up the bricks inside the fireplace which we hadn’t yet touched. I am no mason, as you may have just assumed, but I did my best to even out the bricks, lay new ones with mortar, and replace any super damaged ones with our supply of old bricks we’d uncovered in the backyard in the summer of 2020. I then did a nice smear of mortar on the bricks inside the fireplace and on the floor in front to seal everything in place and tone down the color a bit.
Next up was making the opening look pretty. Matt went to one of our favorite architectural salvage shops and got summer covers to adorn the fireplace openings. If you’re wondering at this point why we didn’t convert them back to being functional, it’s because they’re extremely shallow fireplaces originally meant for burning coal, which we are not interested in burning in our house in the year 2023 because coal is scary. And if we did try to burn wood in them, the logs would basically spill out onto the floor in front of the fireplace which is scary in a totally different way. These fireplaces were destined to be decorative only.
Anyhow, we got our summer covers and used a combination of construction adhesive and masonry screws to get them in place and secured to the brick. Once those were on, more adhesive was used to attach trim around the summer covers for an extra decorative element. A little caulk helped seal all the cracks and then it was time to pick a paint!
We’ve used Tricorn Black by Sherwin-Williams throughout this home, including in the living room adjacent to this kitchen and dining area, on both the inside of our front door and as an accent color on the summer cover in that room. So it seemed like a smart color to use to bring in some continuity between rooms and contrast within the kitchen itself. We painted the entire wraparound mantel, summer covers, and the brick face between them, and we absolutely love how it looks. I mean, whenever we paint something black I get really nervous halfway through, but it’s just got to be a trust-the-process type of situation because every time we’ve finished a paint project with a black, I’ve been unable to imagine a better fit.
Once the paint dried we added a few hooks for our weirdly large assortment of wooden boards and hung those up and it’s looking real cute! We also styled the mantle with a couple favorite decorative pieces and cookbooks, and we’re obsessed with the drama and contrast our big black fireplace brings to our pink kitchen. Is there a K-pop joke in here somewhere? Alexa, play BLACKPINK’s “How You Like That.” We like it a lot.
Thanks for stopping by the blog! Would you ever use black as a major accent color in your home? Let us know what you think!
XOXO
Matt, and Beau, and Fox, and Barley, and Rye