Give Your Fireplace A Budget-Friendly Upgrade With Jenn Todryk's Simple DIY Glaze

Stone fireplaces can be a beautiful element in your home, giving any space a rustic and natural touch that speaks to coziness and old-world charm. Usually one of the most dominant features in a room, they can also be harder to work around when it comes to outfitting the design aesthetic of the room, particularly when remodeling. While you may want to keep the timeless and classic look of a stonework fireplace, often the shade of the stone is not quite what you desire. Jenn Todryk, of HGTV's "No Demo Reno" may just have the perfect solution for this problem — a simple glaze that can be brushed over the stone that changes the coloring slightly while still retaining the stunning character of the original stone. By mixing water and acrylic paint and applying it over the stone, Todryk successfully changes the look of the fireplace to more muted shades that do not, as Todryk says, remind her of a giraffe.

This approach is great if you are looking for a budget-friendly alternative to fully replacing or sandblasting the stone. In addition, it is a fully customizable approach in which color paint you choose for the glaze to get the final result that you desire. 

To create her stone fireplace glaze, Jenn Todryk uses a soft light gray paint, creating a solution of 1 part paint and 2 parts water in a paint can and mixing thoroughly. The glaze she creates is thin and easy to apply over the stone with a brush, allowing the original stone to still show through, but muting and lightening the colors to dusty gray shades rather than the warmer tans and oranges of the original palette. You can paint over the entirety of the stone and grout, or if you like some of the stones, only those you want to change the color of. Todryk uses acrylic paint, but you can also use chalk paint to get a similar effect. Take a look at the results:

While you can get a similar transformation by applying limewash paint to your stone fireplace, it often proves more time-consuming and expensive, costing around $300 to complete a large fireplace and chimney. Jenn Todryk's glaze is a cheaper and speedier option since it uses such a small amount of paint to create the glaze, which means even a large fireplace can be completed for under, $50 even with premium paint.