I can’t believe it’s taken me SO long to post this. We don’t even have this lake house anymore – but this is one of my personal DIY projects that I am MOST proud of.
When my husband and I purchased a foreclosed home to call our lake house, it was one that needed a little TLC and just a few cosmetic updates. One of the greatest eyesores in the place was the fireplace. It looked like something out of a really BAD 70’s disco porn scene. In fact, the first time my brother saw it he asked where the strobe light was and started humming that funky pornish tune “bow-chicka-wow-wow.” Seriously, check out that gold plating on the front of the mantel. Ewwww.
When we had a contractor come to take a look and make suggestions on what we could do to improve the appearance – the cheapest we could get a new, tolerable look for was just under $2,000. Of course that was just not acceptable to me. I knew there had to be a way to achieve a much better appearance for much less.
One one of our many trips to Menards, and while looking at paint colors, I saw this stuff called “Stone Paint” – the cap showed the texture and color of the paint. I showed it to my husband and said I wanted to try a makeover on the fireplace myself – we had nothing to lose, really. I could spend $36 and if we didn’t like it, we wouldn’t be in any worse shape than we already were. BUT, if I did it and we liked it, we saved ourselves a couple of grand.
I grabbed up three colors to coordinate with the three colors of stones we already had and assigned each new color to an old color. Within a couple of hours, I was done and it looked SO much better than I had expected.
I am absolutely in love with this stone paint. In fact, we have landscaping blocks that are just too RED for my taste – this year, we’re going to take a bit of stone paint and give them a fresh look. I’ll let you know how that goes.
As you can see from these photos – the difference is about as drastic as it can get.
