How to Paint a Fireplace Surround - Chantel's Custom Creations

In this post I hope to inspire you to go ahead and paint that fireplace surround! As you can see from my Before and After photos, the surround looks completely different once I added the paint and the graphic to it!

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Before

Preparation

The first thing you will want to do is to clean your surface. My fireplace was in very good shape and all it needed was a good cleaning with a wet rag.

Since this wood color was not that dark, I opted not to paint it out with a Primer first. I just went right to painting.

Painting

I chose to paint this fireplace surround with white chalk paint called Rustoleum Chalked in Linen White. I simply used a bristle brush used for chalk painting and proceeded to brush it on with light even strokes.

I do always suggest if you are painting on carpets to make sure you have some sort of drop cloth underneath. With this particular piece, I also put wood blocks under the bottom so I could get a good even coverage of paint at the bottom of it.

I ended up applying 3 light coats of the chalk paint to my fireplace. And wow, it is looking amazing and what a difference!

But I still wasn’t happy with the final result. I felt like something was missing and there was an amazing large surface on the front of the fireplace which I could add a graphic to. So that is what I did!

Adding a Graphic to a Fireplace Surround

I went into a detailed post HERE on how to apply a graphic to furniture and it lists step by step the procedure I go through to add a graphic. It is such an easy process and believe me, you can do it too!

Distressing

I also chose to distress this piece. I took a 200 grit sanding block and sanded off the edges and the corners of the piece to my desired distressed look.