It'll work fine if the brick hasn't been painted. Use a fortifed thinset mortar. You can get the thinset with the fortifier already mixed in or use a liquid fortifier when you mix it. Do not use the premixed thinset. Use a notched trowel to apply it to the brick and remember to "butter" the backs of the slate tiles. You may have to figure out how to cover the edge of the brick around the fireplace opening. You can cut thin strips of slate and mortar them in. If you have never done tile or stone before, you should read up on it first. Have fun!

I did mine but I took the brick off first and then installed cement board so the tile would be nice and flat. It worked good.

We had a floor to ceiling ugly gray brick fireplace. We decided to tile over the bottom half with 12 x 12 marble and the top half with sheet rock. We love the results. Cost less than $500 and we recouped part of that cost by selling the fireplace insert on ebay for $430. Pictures at the following link show the whole process.

Here is a link that might be useful: fireplace remodel

nice job cordovamom! that fireplace looks great. I may be working on a similiar project soon and was curious about a couple of things. How did you secure that piece of wood to the bricks (what type of anchor did you use? how many? Etc) and how much construction adhesive did you end up using to get your sheetrock to stick? Thanks-

Matt-- Thanks !! To answer your questions, we used lead anchors with lagbolts, 4 of them evenly spaced across the width of the piece of wood used to mount the mantle on. We used Liquid Nails to secure the sheetrock to the brick on the top half of the fireplace. Initially we only used one tube of Liquid Nails, spread in thin stripes across the face of the brick. This didn't hold, so we ended up using another tube and a half of Liquid Nails and really glopped it on in big glops. I didn't get any pictures of that because I was too busy helping to hold the dry wall in place. We ended up bracing the dry wall to hold the glue in place for a few hours to ensure that it stuck. If we had to do it all over again, we would have used a leveler or thinset layer on the brick that was to be covered with tile. The brick wasn't exactly level and we used a chisel in spots to knock off high spots on the brick. A leveler would have made it much easier. Other than that, what we did worked fine and we love the look.

Hi cordovamom, Very nicely remodeled fireplace.
Can you please tell us where did you get those
border tiles (trim pieces) from (local store ) ? Thanks