Honestly? The brick wall is the only thing in that room that I wouldn’t get rid of. If you absolutely can’t afford to get better furnishings right now, you can at least remove the wallpaper and replace the sconces.

That’s definitely in my plan! Removing wallpaper and getting new paint/carpet/wallpaper is the easy part though. I’m just not really sure how to style the fireplace area!

Are you planning on keeping that insert? The brass surround is way too large and you can see that the opening of the fireplace is arched and the surround does not cover it. Just wondering if the insert is open game.

I chuckled when I saw your basement fireplace because it looks a lot like ours did Before we spruced ours up. Here are a few thoughts for you to consider:

We didn’t want to spend piles of money so we went ahead and painted the red brick fireplace BM White Dove. The walls are BM Revere pewter and the ceiling and woodwork are White Dove. Maybe I would have tried a little white washing on the brick instead, but the painter had already applied the paint when I got home so we had what we had. Lol

We stripped off the brass doors—our chimney sweep told me that since we have gas, we keep the damper closed except in use, and we have no children to be tempted to burn themselves, we could just omit any glass doors (at least for now). We don’t use this fire place much anyway.

We ran the electrical for the TV behind that molding at the ceiling which we added. And the tv is on a swivel support. We had some concerns about the tv being too close to the fire box (there is building code about this placement if you want to look it up) so I was thinking of getting a non combustible steel shelf above the fire box to protect the tv from heat since we didn’t have room for a mantle—but there isn’t much heat above the fire box so I’m not in a rush for that And we aren’t worried about sparks (This is a gas fireplace). I saw the steel shelves for heat deflection on Etsy. We recently bought a sound bar for the tv and now I’m playing with ideas on how/where to mount it. If I were to buy it again I would get the tv that you can hang a sound bar on.

We haven’t done much decorating but I expect to get a couple of wall sculptures or art pieces to mount on either side of the firebox area. I bought accordion window shades cut to fit from Home Depot. We reupholstered our old furniture in neutral Crypton tweed fabrics. Crypton is amazingly stain repellant and not so expensive so we went ahead and made our furniture very light colored to brighten up the basement. I comparison shopped online for the fabric and bought some on Ebay and some from SailRite found online. If you want to replace your sconces you might want to look at ‘open box’ mark downs online (Lamps Plus has a lot of them, also ebay). Also Home Depot has a lot more lighting online than they have in the store, but the good thing is that you can buy online to try it out and easily return it to your local HD If it doesn’t work.

Right now we are remodeling our main floor so we have a lot of junk sitting around this room, nevertheless we are happy with the budget results for this fireplace and tv room. Good luck! J.