Hey there! How are you on this lovely fall day? I’m back with a few more quick tips on sprucing up fireplaces – I shared how to open one up and clean the glass last week and wanted to share this info with you as well. Are you tired of seeing our fireplace yet? 🙂 I swear this is the last you’ll see it till I get it finished – I’m getting there! Follow along on Instagram for some more updates today and this week.

Because our fireplace was in the corner before (shakes fists in air!!) the surround was very small just because we had limited wall space to work with:

It was smaller than a standard sized one but way bigger than we had before so I was thrilled. So when I tiled the surround I kind of overlapped the firebox a bit. If I hadn’t then those skinny parts on the sides would have been super thin.

The metal sides of the fireplace were a mess from that thinset and the construction and there was nothing I could to get it off:

It was around the whole thing – it’s harder to see here but you can see the white around all the edges:

I tried scrubbing and scraping and nothing worked. I had a solution in mind but didn’t want do it until I was completely done with all the tiling and grouting.

This high heat paint comes in a can and in a spray paint version:

I went with a can because there was no way I was chancing getting any spray on the new tiles. If I had planned better I could have sprayed it outside before we even put it back in place. That would have been smart. 🙂 But I would have had to be be really careful with it during the rest of the process so this was fine.

This paint is oil-based so it is stinky and it is not easy to remove if you get it where you don’t want it. I taped off around the metal, careful to cover every bit of the grout. If it got on the grout it would have soaked right in. That part made me sweat a bit. A lot.

I used a cheapy throw away brush to quickly paint over just the metal where all the residue was:

I didn’t take pics of that part because I was sweating. But you get the idea. Thankfully the painter’s tape did an excellent job and there was no bleed through at all. But can you believe how much better it looks? You can only tell there was anything there if you sit right in front of it and take a photo. 😉

Here’s another tip – you know the long panels along the top and bottom of the glass? If yours gets scratched up you can just pull them right off:

They’re held on by magnets on most models I’ve seen:

Years ago I spray painted mine with basic oil rubbed bronze spray paint – it wasn’t high heat and it’s held up just fine. Mine did have some scratches so I took them off to spray them again but then decided just to leave them off. I’m not sure why they are there anyway – you really can’t tell the difference if they’re there or not, at least with our fireplace.

Oh, and one more quick little nugget. If you have a gas fireplace and have the gas main switch like we do, you can paint it to match your wall if you’d like. It’s just metal and a few coats of paint will cover it:

Or if you’d like to spray paint it’s easily removed – you just unscrew it. That was helpful when I was tiling too! I didn’t realize that you could take it off till someone showed me.

This baby has gone through quite the transformation over the past few weeks! Here it is a couple months ago:

And here it is now:

The big wall above the fireplace is what I’m working on now. In my head it’s going to look fantastic – here’s hoping. I can’t wait to get this all done! After that I just have some smaller projects to finish up and I’m DONE with this renovation.

Have you used the high heat paint on anything? I’ve got a can of it if anyone needs some. 😉

P.S. To see how I tiled the surround go here.
To see how I installed the metal sheeting on the doors go here.

Thrifty Decor Chick