Bricking a fireplace hearth

When we moved into our house I was excited that we had a fireplace.

(Gambino Realtors)

We never used it though.  It wasn't until a couple years ago that we had it inspected and cleaned.

I always thought the brick was ugly and the small Terra Cotta tile hearth equally unimpressive.

So, I did a face lift to the brick.  Painting it white as well as painting over the Terra Cotta tiles and the brass fireplace screen.  (I used high-heat paint by the way.)

We also removed the wall sconces and clad above the fireplace with barn wood.

 I knew these would be temporary fixes at best.  

I had spoken to the company that serviced our fireplace about getting a slab of stone for the hearth.  They suggested not removing the tiles since our fireplace could be compromised, but rather just set a piece of stone over the existing tiles.  I thought however that stone would maybe give more of a modern look that I didn't want, so we decided to do a brick hearth. I know that sounds counter-productive since I had been covering up brick with paint.  But this brick is pretty, unlike what we had!

We used a product called VersaTile.  Which is a thin brick.  It comes in a variety of colors, we used the Berkeley Blend.

First we had to cut and lay a piece of cement board over the tile.  We went wider and longer than the existing hearth.  That was screwed into place.  Then we merely used thinset to lay the brick, spacing them as we wanted them.  We used a running bond pattern.

After allowing the thinset to cure for at least 24 hours we then grouted/mortared the brick.

I think going with brick instead of a piece of stone was a good choice.

We didn't want to use the existing fireplace screen.  We found this simple screen at Lowes...

It was a steal at $60!

We consider this merely stage one of our fireplace make-over.  But we couldn't be happier with the progress thus far!