Remedies for a Painted Fireplace

Brick and stone fireplaces are authentic, beautiful, and nearly indestructible. Yet people paint over them! Can that be reversed?

By Mary Ellen Polson

In houses of almost any age, it’s common to see masonry fireplaces coated with paint. Bringing back a painted masonry surface is devilishly hard. No one solution seems to work for all situations; success or failure is a matter of interpretation. Sure, you can repaint the brick, but that just compounds the problem and makes future removal even more difficult. That was the dilemma facing Emma and Bennet Kinghorn, who post about the restoration of their high-style 1896 house on Instagram (instagram.com/oldhouseomaha). Confronted with a starkly white fireplace surround in a room with a heart-stopping Beaux Arts staircase, Emma instantly knew the paint wasn’t original and set about stripping it. “I always want to see what’s behind the curtain,” she says, adding that anyone who wants to paint brick should first…

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Old House Journal (Digital) - 1 Issue, May/June 2024

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