To catch you up…we bought a 1970’s home we are remodeling to (hopefully) move into in July! Since we are at a standstill waiting for permits, we have been modernizing the rock in our home. The way we have modernized the rock was with basically with A LOT of mortar and Limewash. We already updated the rock wall in our entry. This past week Kevin did our fireplace. The fireplace went a lot faster because we knew exactly what we wanted the end result to look like and from trial and error. It still took about 20 hours to complete. Practice makes you an expert.
Fireplace Rock Before-
Fireplace Rock After-
And here is the after! We didn’t want to completely cover up the rock, but since it was such a unique Idaho Travertine and really orange, doing a mortar wash was what we ended up with. We didn’t want it to look like painted rock, rather like an old fireplace you would see in a really old church in England. The fireplace mantle was not quite the color we wanted. We love the scale and look of the mantle, just wanted to lighten it. So we bleached it….
I did try Outdoor Bleach right on top of the current mantle. But the mantle had some type of sealer so the bleach didn’t do anything to it. We took our hand sander and went over the mantle with a heavy grit sander.
You can see the difference from just sanding the mantle.
Outdoor Bleach is slightly stronger than regular bleach and has sodium hydroxide. I would recommend wearing a mask (bleach is so strong!) and clothes you don’t care of they get ruined. You could apply with a paint brush or I liked using a mini roller to avoid any splashing of bleach. We ended up doing two coats of the outdoor bleach. Letting it dry 24 hours in-between.
And here is the after! Sanding the mantle did make it lighter. But it had a slight pinkish tone. The outdoor bleach took that right out.
I LOVE how the mantle turned out. And I should mention that the built-in to the left won’t be staying. We will have to do a new built-in because we need some of that space for Finn’s closet that is right behind this fireplace wall. We are going to do the Outdoor Bleach to the ceiling too. The ceiling we won’t have to sand. I did a test strip. You can see below.
It’s easy to bleach wood that hasn’t been sealed. You can see our ceiling just has a stain, and was pretty raw. It did take about 24 hours to see a change from the bleach application. I did just use regular bleach on the ceiling samples and it worked perfectly.
I can not wait to decorate this fireplace!!!!! Imagine it at Christmas??? I will be dreaming about it. See how we did the mortar treatment to the fireplace here
We have high timber ceilings that are orange. I’ll be watching you bleach yours intently! How to do it without it going all over you, in your eyes. Looking forward to see how Don tackles it ☺️
It will be interesting! Don & Patty will wear lots of protective gear!
Looks so good! We have an orang-y “heavily lacquered) mantle. Also 70s house 🙋🏼♀️ Hopefully we can sand all that lacquer off…would you say you applied the bleach “heavily”? And did you do more than 1 coat of bleach? Or just one pass.
good question- we did two coats of bleach and let it dry 24 hours in-between. Good luck!
Your rock and mantle transformations are absolutely beautiful!
thank you!!!
It looks so beautiful! I have questions about the inside of the fireplace. Did you put in gas logs? And, what else did you do to it?
It is still a wood burning fireplace. We will have a gas insert put in (having someone come look at it soon)
It’s amazing!!!!! 😍😍😍 I love it soo much!! And ahh totally can’t wait to see it at Christmas time!! Does the mantle still smell like bleach still? I only ask because we are likely adding wood to our ceiling of our new kitchen Reno and I want to lighten it before we put it up but we live in our house that we renovated so I’m a little worried about how long it will take for the smell of bleach to go! I mean I can do the boards before we put them up in our case but I’m hoping to not have to wait forever to put them up! Lol! Okay so sorry for the very long question! Haha!
I was worried it would, but no! And nowhere else smelled like bleach. It was a good test before we do our ceiling.
And thank you!