Project House Update: And Now For a Coat of Paint

I know I've complained a lot about tiling the fireplace, but it is official! All the tiles are up! I wrote the whole post and realized I had left that out! That last time you saw it, it was almost there, but patchy. Not anymore! Now onto the next problem with it! Yay...

In the continuing saga of the fireplace we will never finish, did you ever expect paint to come into the picture? When we started this project, I didn't either, but it will hopefully act as a much needed band-aid. Let me explain.

The original facade of the fireplace had tiles around the opening. When we chiseled them off, it took some of the material off the inside of the opening. 

Dan's original plan was to mix up some grout that matches the color of the tile and coat the edge of the opening, all the way to the fire housing part (what is that called? The part where the fire actually sits. The part that is past the opening.)

We made a couple of attempts to match the color and it wasn't going well. We were close, but not close enough where I comfortable coating a four inch fireplace section with it.

I came up with an idea that would minimize the amount of grout we would need. We'd paint the entire interior of the fireplace and just grout right around the edge of the fireplace. Just the first inch, inch and a half, into the opening. It would be enough grout to round the jagged tile edge and cover the damage from removing the old tiles.

Rustoleum makes this great paint that's meant to handle high heats. {Sidenote: the high heat paint we used was basically their spray paint in liquid form, so the fumes were quite intense. If you plan on using it, paint outside if possible. Since we had to be indoors, we opened every window in the house and had all the fans on, with a box fan pointed directly into the fireplace.}

It's amazing how one simple coat of black paint unified the interior of the fireplace. It's almost two dimensional now.

The paint looks kind of streaky in the pictures, but That's mainly reflection from the flash. There is some streaks, but you don't notice it in real life. Also, the thought of having to endure the fumes for another coat of paint is not worth it right now.

We'll have to grout a small strip around the opening, but I'm much more comfortable trying to color match a small strip of grout than a thick one.