Quite the Endeavor

So, the house that we bought was built in the 90's and has quite a bit of oak, every where! We decided to take on the project of redoing each room by painting the oak trim to update the house. Our living room has a huge fireplace with dark brick. After looking at Pinterest for inspiration, I finally decided to take the plunge and try to white wash the brick. What an endeavor! All of the people on Pinterest must be awesome or have smaller fireplaces because it took my husband and me three days to complete it and we still aren't completely finished. I took pictures to show the progression. Like the Pinterest posts, I used equal parts paint and water. I put the paint mixture on with a paint brush and then wiped it off with a wet towel. I freaked out a bit because the paint looked really white at first, but then after it soaked into the brick, it looked less pigmented. After I finished (six hours later), I realized that the mortar was brown and didn't look right. So, we purchased white grout filler and used a toothbrush to paint over the grout. This took three bottles and two days. We painted the mantel a light grey. However, I think that we will provably paint it a darker grey to off-set the lightness of the brick. The next endeavor is painting the oak trim and the walls. What have we gotten ourselves into?!

Before