Painted Fireplace - Before & After

My husband and I do a lot of home improvement projects together.  I guess you could say it's our hobby.  Before we met I purchased a 1400 square foot 1960s ranch style house that needed quite a bit of work.  I started by painting the entire inside of the house myself.  Fortunately, I met my husband shortly after that and our path to being weekend warriors began.  We've since sold that house, moved to Texas, and started working on our newer but less charming suburban home. 

Our first project of 2011 was to paint our fireplace!  We really debated making this change, but eventually decided to take the plunge.  Here is our before picture:

And, here's the after:

We used Sherwin-Williams Concrete & Masonry Primer to prime the brick.  We had some soot stains and wanted to make sure they didn't show through the top coat.  We hand painted the mortar and then used a roller to cover the brick.  We used Sherwin-Williams ProMar 200 paint in a low sheen finish custom matched to the color of our built-ins to finish off the project.  You'll notice that we've also painted the insides of the book shelves a fun lime-green (Glidden's Granny Apple Smith).  In total, I think this project costs us about $100 in paint and supplies.  Lots of impact for the money!  The mirror is from Ballard Designs and was a great find for $89!  The copper tub holding our firewood is an antique washtub that orignally belonged to my husband's grandparents!