Faux Concrete Fireplace

The center of the house. The place where family and friends gather. The fireplace is quite literally the main focal and grounding point....so it needs to have little bit of something something to make it special, right? Right.

Personally, I'd say my style is anywhere from modern farmhouse to industrial, but I definitely can veer and that's OK. As a caveat, I like to think with most anything in design, if you love it, who cares what anyone else thinks.

From the beginning of the house plan, we knew we wanted to incorporate concrete or plaster to the fireplace. In the end we married industrial with farmhouse and couldn't be happier!

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Fireplace Breakdown

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SHIPLAP

We opted for a green (Sherwin Williams - Sage Green Light SW2851) vertical shiplap above the mantle because if you know me, you know I love green. It's an earthy green, a bit of a bright olive color and it feels cozy!

MANTLE

For the mantle we found a beautiful piece of white oak from a local lumber yard and fortunately we only had to lightly sand the sides, trim one edge, add about 4 coats of matte polyurethane and voila! It adds so much character to an otherwise brand new fireplace.

DIY CONCRETE LOOK

The fireplace is not concrete. Let me repeat. The fireplace is not concrete.

While we did want a real concrete look on the fireplace, we actually had it priced out and it would have been $2,000 for someone to apply it!

I am not confident in our skills to use and apply real concrete, so we opted for faux concrete. There are a lot of faux concrete options out there. You can do venetian plaster in the color of concrete, mix paint and plaster, etc.

Since I knew we were going to DIY this look, I really wanted to keep the process simple, which meant not mixing any paints, plasters or anything of the sort that could lead inconsistent color or texture. Being the focal point of the room, I needed to be sure I would get the same color and texture result each time, I wanted to get it right.

Cue Portola Paints. They have a product called Roman Clay and it comes in many different colors and every application I'd seen looked amazing! They have a tutorial on YouTube which made it seam so simple...and it was!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2dCmS5inyk&t=846s

We used Roman Clay in the color Sasha

The size options are below:

1 qt (40-50 sq ft)

1 gallon (150-200 sq ft)

5 gallon (800-1000 sq ft)

We ended up needing 2 quarts, but looking back I would have started with a gallon. I felt like we were skimping in some areas towards the end, just to make sure we'd have enough to cover the whole fireplace. We did 3 coats on the entire fireplace. Two quarts cost right around $100, which is far better than the actual concrete we were quoted.

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PROCESS PICS

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Here are some process and final pics of the fireplace!

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Let me know if you have any questions!