How To Whitewash Your Brick Fireplace

How to easily whitewash a brick wall.

Posted by Marly D.

About

I had been wanting to update our fireplace ever since I saw it. Not only was the brick color a bit dark for the space, but the brass fireplace needed updating as well. After I whitewashed the brick, the room completely transformed! It did take a long time to do, but I'm so happy with the way it turned out. It's now a statement wall in our living room instead of an eyesore.

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You Will Need (3 things)

  • Water
  • Paint Brush
  • Paint

Steps (4 steps, 2880 minutes)

  1. 1

    Prepare your brick. If necessary, dust it off to prepare for painting.

  2. 2

    Combine half water and half paint. For my brick wall, I actually used a combination of paint colors. I used 1/2 white paint and 1/2 gray paint (the gray color was the same color of my walls) to make my paint mixture. I did this because I wanted the brick color to play off the surrounding walls. If you want, you can simply combine 1/2 white paint and 1/2 water.

  3. 3

    Paint. For my particular case, I decided to use a paint brush as opposed to a paint roller. I did this because I could control exactly how much paint I used on each brick. Of course, this method takes way longer than it would to use a roller, but I only had one wall to paint, so it was feasible.

    When I painted the walls, I dabbed the bricks until I achieved the desired look I wanted. I let the first coat of paint dry and decided that I wanted some more inconsistency with the bricks. So, I went back in and painted random bricks with a second coat.

    Note: You may think you have overpainted, but the bricks will soak up the paint. Let the bricks dry so you can judge how they look before you add more paint.

    Here’s how the brick looked after painting.

    You’ll notice some bricks look whiter than the others. That’s because I did a second coat of paint on the whiter ones to make it look less uniform.

  4. 4

    Let the paint dry and enjoy!