Detour ahead!

We're taking a bit of a detour today because I simply cannot live with my house in the filthy, disorganized state I've let it fall into over the past six weeks, so I'm taking today - and maybe even tomorrow! - off to clean.  But since I promised myself I'd blog here daily (or at least M-F), I don't dare fall down on the job less than two weeks in.  My friend Evin suggested that I post about how my obsession with the guest room re-do has caused the rest of my house (make that 'life') to fall apart, but that would become a whole new project in itself.  Imagine yourself in this scenario: You start cleaning your carpets, but don't finish up before you have to start a job for a client.  The client's room requires a lot of sewing, so your sewing room gets torn apart and threads tracked throughout the house.  The carpet shampooer gets set aside (after flooding the bathroom because the rag you tied around the faucet didn't actually contain the leak) in the hallway, because the carpet in the sewing room and two other bedrooms still need cleaning.  While out looking for fabrics for your client, you find the perfect fabric for your own living room drapes, so you end up shopping all over town for curtain rods... only to find the perfect bedding for your guest room.  Sometime in the midst of all of this, your thyroid meds prescription runs out and you don't dare ask for the doc to call it in because you've blatantly ignored four phone calls  going back four months to schedule your annual exam.  You finally finish the client's room, and days later the bed from the guest room is snapped up from a Craig's List ad.  Uh oh:  Christmas is coming, going to need a bed in there.  Hmmm, my son has been bugging me for years to start a blog.  This room re-do would be the perfect time!  Um... um...  really?  Right now, huh?  Living room drapes to be sewn, carpets to be cleaned, four rooms completely torn apart, kitchen floor getting grodier by the day, and why am I so tired lately? Ohhhh, three weeks off the thyroid meds.    Why, sure!  Why not start a blog!?!  Yeeeeesh.

I digress.  I actually do have something to share today, though it's not from The Room.  While I did make some (minimal) progress yesterday, there's not enough to share, so when I got up this morning I was dreading facing this blog.  So instead, I went to read one of my new, favorite blogs - Addicted 2 Decorating,  and bless her heart, Kristi provided me with my quick and easy blog for today.     She shared "before" photos on a "great room" she's about to begin work on and one of the photos is of the fireplace, which has rather dated brick that she plans to paint.

Now I am absolutely, positively, not one of those people whose knee-jerk reaction to this idea is "OMG! No!  You can't paint brick!!!"   Nosiree, I'll paint pretty much anything and roll my eyes at the naysayers who gasp in horror as I do.  However, dated fireplace brick can also be easily changed without painting it, so that's the cheap and easy decor fix I'm going to show you today.  

We'll start with a photo of my exterior brick, because it's what my fireplace brick looked like originally, but I never thought to get "before" pics of my fireplace brick when I first changed the color of it 15 years ago....

As brick goes, it's not horrible by any means, but my family room fifteen years ago was done in muted shades of purple and sage, and at the time I just really felt my brick needed to be more rosy-hued.  I was able to get exactly the look I wanted by simply using very watered-down paints in the tones I wanted and sponging them onto the brick.  Brick being as porous as it is, it just soaked up that watery paint like a stain and voila! I had my perfect, rosy-hued brick... 

Then about ten years ago, we did a major remodel of our kitchen, which completely opened it up to the family room where this fireplace lives.  The remodel included this granite...

Which began to dictate my color choices throughout the room, and which did not work with the rosy-hued brick.  In fact, the original brick probably would have been perfect, but that seemed ever-so-boring an idea to me.   But I knew I wanted deeper tones, so that's where I started, and again by simply using very watered-down paints and universal tints.  Here's a photo showing the progress from rosy-hued (on the left) to a bit more earthen tones...

It was better, but I also was tired of the 'neatness'  of my brick.  I think there's actually a word for it, but I'm not a mason nor am I up on masonry terms, so 'neat' will have to do.  What I mean is the tooling, mostly:  Each brick is perfectly rectangular, and each row of mortar perfectly the same width.   I really, really like an older, antique-ier looking brick, with crumbled edges and a roughness to it.  Enter one of my favorite mediums....

So cheap; so versatile!  

After deepening the color of the rest of the brick, I just troweled this on haphazardly, letting the brick show through in places and adding a bit of color on top of it to mimic the water staining you see on real, aged brick here and there, and I am so so so happy with the results...

                                         

While I know I wasn't haphazard enough to produce a truly "aged" brick, it's a lot closer to what I was wanting.  And while I'm also definitely not one of those people who worries about resale value when I'm decorating my own home, it can't hurt to head those "OMG!  No!  You can't paint brick!" people off at the pass.  Because no one would look at this brick and say "Oh, geez - they painted the brick!"  

See you all tomorrow!