How I updated ugly red brick in my dining room

Hi there! 

Today, I am going to share a little about our dining room. I have never had my own dining room before...lol. 

In every other place we have lived we never had one, so this being our first house we ever bought, I was so overjoyed that it had a dining room! And not only did it have a dining room but that dining room had a real fireplace!! 

But this is what the fireplace in the dining room looked like.....

When we moved in I added the 100 yr old mantle (that came out of my fathers grandparents house)

and dressed it up best I could......

But that red brick just stood out like a sore thumb!

And now I will show you every angle of the dining room....lol and look there is the kitchen too!!

I never want to actually use this fireplace with a fire because of the mess and soot it makes, but i got this candle holder at a yard sale and its perfect for this fireplace!

So after looking for ways to get rid of the red brick, but I didn't want to just paint over it, I moved everything to one side of the room and got started...

I mixed white semi-gloss paint half with equal amounts of water, as a white wash...the 3 coats turned out like this

then 2 more coats tuned out like this.....

Put it all back together and I HATED it!!!

It looked worse than the red brick! I almost cried.....almost.

The look I was going for was more like this (a photo i found on Pinterest)

beautiful, clean, almost creamy white.....

So back to work I went, this time I added 3 parts paint to 1 part water

The first coat was already so much better!!

This is me, not crying that I ruined my dining room lol

It was finally coming along correctly!

Now that I was on the right path for the brick, in between while the brick dried I tackled the mantle, I went with a red, because, of the fabric on my dining room chairs, I hadn't found the right material to recover them yet, so I had to pick a color out of the existing fabric to match, so red it was!

I also painted the inside of the fireplace and the red tile on the floor black.

I put everything back together again, but this time I was unhappy with the decor....it was lacking something

Here is where I show you all angles of my dining room again!! and OH look the kitchen again.....lol 

If you can see from this photo I changed out the decor for more beachy stuff and I really love it! 

And notice the chairs.....

.I just decided I wasn't going to reupholster these chairs, instead I wanted to replace them with all wooden chairs, so my search started on local used furniture sites and I got 7 chairs for $40!! 

5 matching ones came form one person for $30 then 2 more I found at a yard sale for $5 each.....its a good thing I did because the day before I was going to pick up the chairs this happened...

I love the new chairs so much! It makes the dining room look so much spacious! 

I cant wait to makeover the chairs and the table! 

I have big plans for them!