I am so in love with this little DIY project Andrew and I did! I have always loved the idea of painting my furniture, but people telling me “no, leave the wood natural, you can’t paint over it!” Andrew and I are in love with our house that we bought a little over a year ago! The one thing I wasn’t a huge fan of… a big OAK fireplace! Don’t get my wrong, I LOVE having a fireplace! Especially right now- it’s on about every night! But I wasn’t a huge fan of the oak.. Plus all of our windows, including the two bordering the fireplace, are trimmed in white. We had the walls painted right when move we moved in, and I was tempted to paint the fireplace right away as well. Buuuttttt, I resorted back to the voices before telling me to leave oak natural, and didn’t. I gave it one year- one full year for it to grow on me, and not surprisingly the wood look didn’t win me over. So we went out, bought the supplies and painted it white! And now I’m in love with it! Our décor feels better with it and it looks perfect with our white trimmed windows! If you’re debating changing something up a bit, I say go for it!:)

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Our Procedure: Clean the fireplace, wiping down all the wood surfaces with TPS, a cleaner that preps surfaces for painting. Tape all the way around the wood covering the walls and tile. Paint an oil-based bonding primer over all of the oak (we used Zinsser), let that dry (we did 24 hrs). Lightly take sandpaper over the fireplace, roughing it up/adding texture. Next, we did two coats of white paint, and waited 24 hrs between each coat. The paint we used was Valspar semi-gloss Swiss Coffee. Remove tape to reveal.

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A snap shot of the before!

AFTER!