We bought our home three years ago. We always intended to lighten up the fireplace wall somehow.

After hours of looking at Pinterest and YouTube tutorials, I was still nervous about attempting a whitewash myself, so we hired a designer who hired a painter.

While I was out of the room with my two small children, the painter proceeded to paint the *entire brick wall dark grey!* It was the gloomiest looking thing. :-(

I asked her how this was going to become whitewashed—she had inspiration photos and none included dark grey base coats—and she said she still had to add more layers.

She then basically painted a faux brick wall over our bricks. She even added red paint, since she had painted over all the actually red brick. It all looked very fake and cheesy to me, but I didn’t speak up. I figured she was the professional. (Expensive lesson learned.)

Instead of buying a mantle we liked, but that our designer said was too inexpensive to be good quality, she arranged for a carpenter to do a custom build. He ended up building a massive mantle, with many more elements than we’d specified. We had wanted—and specified—simplicity in scale and detail.

I was so unhappy with the result.

We ended up sanding the red-paint-detailed bricks down to the original color with a belt sander, applied a sealant, and then spent hours and hours attempting to whitewash what we had. I painted the mortar lines with the white wash too, which I’m Not sure was a good idea.

We pried off a gigantic “keystone” that he’d added at the last minute before I had a chance to really consider the option, and also removed the smallest squares of wood stacked as corbels on the mantle. We tried to repair the damaged spots with wood putty, sanded down some of the harshest corners and edges, and then stained the whole thing a darker color.

The room is now too gray/washed out and just. . . cold. And I miss the element of original bricks. I wanted them brightened, not obliterated.

Should we attempt stripping with something like Soy Gel or Citristrip? Just paint over the whole thing in a white? Paint the mantle white? Hang something along the sides to break up the brick? Maybe it doesn’t look terrible—and it’s just very far off from what I’d wanted and imagined? Help!