One of the things I was so excited about when we bought our house was the fact it had a fireplace. I have always wanted a fireplace and mantel to decorate, especially at Christmas with the kids stockings! When we bought the house though, our fireplace was far from the show stopping feature I had dreamt of. It was there, but in desperate need of a makeover, so that's what we gave it! DIY style, of course ;)
The first thing we did was remove the old tiles from the floor and got the inside and outside plaster boarded and plastered. This did make our gap even smaller but the walls were so rough, we had no choice! We did get a tradesman in to plaster it as plastering is one thing we are not confident in! But once that was done, we did the rest ourselves.
It didn't take me long to decide what to do around the outside; I've always loved the red brick look and so we went for brickslips kindly gifted by Kuci Design. We used a manual tile cutter to cut them to size. They were quite thick so some of them did break but we made sure to get enough to cater for breakage. We used a tile adhesive to stick them on and watched lots of YouTube videos to see how to do it and soon we were flying. We did use spacers although the brickslips are rough shapes and sizes anyway so naturally, there are a few bigger gaps in places.
To do the outside, we first found a surround that we wanted, got the measurements and drew the lines on so we knew how far up and out we needed to do the bricks. You could obviously put your surround on first and then just fill the gap, it's up to you!
Once the brickslips were dry, we used a mortar that we mixed ourselves to point it. We didn't buy a pointing gun, to be honest I did most of it with my finger but I think it worked well and again we watched lots of YouTube videos to see how to do it. It was finally looking a bit more like a real fireplace.
Once we fixed our surround, it was a million times better than when we first bought the house. This was Christmas last year as you can tell from the decor. We weren't sure what to do with the hearth, I went back and forth for months but in the end, we decided to just use the brickslips we had leftover. We had just enough so I figured it was meant to be ;)
I'm so glad we went for that now as it just finished it off and I'm not sure any other tiles would have looked right. When we got our floor changed from that horrible carpet as well, we got the oak border around the brickslips and I love how it looks! It finally is the fireplace I dreamt of and I can't wait to have the girls stockings hanging up this Christmas now the room is finished!
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