I spent three weekends staring at my grandmother’s 1970s stone fireplace, wondering if paint could actually save it.
The thing about stone fireplaces is they carry this weight—not just physical, though mine definitely had that, but cultural weight too. Like, you’re not supposed to mess with them. They’re supposed to be timeless or whatever. Except my grandmother’s fireplace wasn’t timeless; it was trapped in a specific, unfortunate time when orange-brown river rock seemed like a good idea for interior design. I’d walk past it every day and feel this low-grade irritation, the kind that builds up over months until you’re googling “can you paint stone” at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday. Turns out you can, and people have been doing it for decades, though the internet makes it seem like this brand-new revelation every six months when another DIY blogger discovers Benjamin Moore’s “White Dove” and a foam roller.
The first step—and I cannot stress this enough—is cleaning, which nobody talks about properly. Stone is porous, obviously, and if your fireplace has been sitting there since the Carter administration, it’s absorbed decades of dust, smoke residue, cooking grease that somehow migrated from the kitchen, and probably some things you don’t want to think about.
Why Your Stone Fireplace Probably Needs More Primer Than You Think It Does
Here’s the thing: most DIY guides will tell you one coat of primer is fine.
They’re wrong, or at least they’re optimizing for page views instead of actual results. I used three coats on my project, and I could still see the orange bleeding through in certain lights. Stone has this incredibly annoying property where it absorbs paint unevenly—the smooth river rocks in my grandmother’s fireplace took primer completely differently than the rough limestone pieces wedged between them. A painter I consulted (after my first failed attempt, because of course there was a first failed attempt) told me he usually budgets for four coats on older stone, sometimes five if there’s smoke damage. The primer brand matters too, though I hate admitting that because it sounds like I’m shilling for Big Paint or whatever. Zinsser’s B-I-N shellac-based primer worked for me after the cheaper latex primer literally just sat on the surface and peeled off in sheets three days later, which was its own special kind of demoralizing.
I guess the trickiest part is the mortar joints.
Nobody warns you about this, but the recessed areas between stones create these little shadow pockets that look great when you’re going for a rustic unpainted look and look absolutely terrible when you’re trying to achieve a smooth, monochromatic finish. You have two options: embrace the texture and accept that your painted fireplace will still have depth and variation, or spend approximately seventeen hours with an angled brush getting paint into every single crevice. I tried the second approach on the left side of my fireplace and the first approach on the right side, and honestly? I can’t tell the difference from more than four feet away, which made me question a lot of life choices.
The Part Where Everything Goes Wrong Before It Goes Right (Usually)
About halfway through my project, I had what I can only describe as a small crisis about authenticity. Was I erasing history? Was I commiting some kind of architectural sin?
The internet has very strong opinions about painted stone, and roughly half of those opinions involve words like “sacrilege” and “irreversible,” which is ironic because paint is actually one of the most reversible home improvements you can make. It’s just tedious to reverse. I talked to a historic preservationist—not because my grandmother’s 1970s ranch house is historic, but because I was procrastinating—and she pointed out that people have been painting stone structures since, like, ancient Egypt, give or take a few thousand years. Medieval castles were often covered in limewash. Victorian homes had painted brick and stone everywhere. This idea that stone must remain “natural” is actually a pretty modern affectation, probably dating back to the mid-20th century Arts and Crafts movement, though don’t quote me on that because I’m working from half-remembered architecture podcasts here.
The actual painting part is weirdly meditative once you get past the primer nightmare. I used a combination of foam rollers for the flat surfaces and cheap chip brushes for detail work, going through probably fifteen brushes total because I kept forgetting to clean them properly and they’d harden overnight. Two coats of satin-finish latex paint in a color that’s best described as “greige”—that gray-beige hybrid that’s somehow everywhere right now—and the fireplace transformed from dated liability to something that actually looks intentional.
Wait—maybe the most important thing is managing your expectations about drying time. Stone stays cold, especially if your fireplace backs up to an exterior wall like mine does, and cold surfaces make paint dry slower and cure unevenly. My first coat looked blotchy and terrible for about four days before it finally evened out, and I definately spent at least two of those days convinced I’d ruined everything. Patience is not my strong suit, but stone painting requires it in quantities I didn’t know I needed to possess.
The finished result isn’t perfect, and I think that’s actually the point. There are spots where the texture shows through more than others, places where the paint pooled slightly in mortar joints, a section near the hearth where I got impatient and didn’t let the primer dry fully so there’s a barely-visible wrinkle in the top coat. But the fireplace doesn’t dominate the room anymore with its agressive 1970s orange energy, and that feels like enough of a transformation to justify the bruised knees and paint-spattered clothes.
