It’s been over a year since I shared my last DIY with you – I know, I know, shame on me. But, I’m back today with a good one. I’ve been in my house for 3 and a half years now and even though the fireplace was the first thing I painted (it used to be exposed wood – a brown pine colour, not really my taste), I was never completely satisfied with it. The long and short of it, I hated the tiles in the surround, and even though I did despise them, it would have been such a big hassle to change the tiles, and probably quite an expensive job too. Plus, I’m sure there are some people that actually like the tiles, so I didn’t want to do anything permanent and remove them for good. I needed a semi-permanent solution that looked good.

Now you know I’m a big fan of marble contact paper, but what I actually used was something different. Wall tile stickers by Robin Sprong – who I met at the beginning of the year at Heimtextil – and by the way, he designs the most amazing wallpaper. I’m not sure that they still offer the marble wall tile stickers anymore but there are plenty of other designs that might take your fancy. Otherwise, you could of course use marble contact paper in exactly the same way. I should make it clear that if you are trying this in your own home, I only recommend this DIY on unused fires, the heat could well make the sticky paper melt and I definitely don’t want that to happen. My fire is used so it will be trial and error for me, I’ll let you know if they do end up melting off but fingers crossed they don’t, the tiles don’t actually get that hot surprisingly so I think we’re good. But I know plenty of people that have fireplaces that they don’t use so maybe this could come in useful for some!

Buy more contact paper than you think you need just in case, then firstly you need to measure the area that you are covering up and cut your contact paper to size. Keep all your offcuts, they might come in handy later. Then all you need to do is peel the back off and start applying the contact paper to the area! It’s difficult to measure awkward spaces so if you over-compensated the space just use a pair of scissors or a stanley knife and score off the excess and use your off cuts to fill in any small gaps at the end. And that’s pretty much all there is to it!

So what do you think? Do you like the makeover?