I loathe our fireplace. The bricks are far too large. It's just tacky. We planned to refinish it when we bought the house. We didn't bother to cover the brick when we painted because it was going to be ripped our or covered up. We....then I went to take the first brick out and realized it would be A LOT of work....and 4 years later we're still trying to decide what to do.

So, I'm pretty much set on covering the existing bricks. Neighbors have tried to convince us that ripping it out or painting it is the way to go, but I've seen so many great refinishes here (and on links posted here) over the years that I really think it's what we're looking for.

My questions....and I apologize if they're silly. My husband is a handy guy but prior to this house has never had a fireplace much less worked with one. -- The doors. We don't hate them. We don't NEED to replace them, but will if we need to and realize there are much nicer products out there. We're unsure how that would even work though. It seems that the piece that the doors are on was installed before the bricks. Would we have to cut the piece out? It also seems that our piece is inset and most of the doors I see now (and at the home imporvement stores) are flush with the brick/stone/tile. If we were also able to change this out to a flush mounted unit, would we use metal to fill the void we created (right now there is a metal filler between the back of the doors and the fake brick deals inside the fireplace).

Next dumb question. The bricks across the top stick out a bit further than the bricks on the sides. I assume we would use something to level out the difference. What would we use?

Okay. I'll leave it at that LOL. The wood working we've totally got covered once we figure the rest of this out.

Here's a pic. I can take other angles if that helps any.

[IMG]http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y119/mateasmom/Our%20House/IMG_3913_3.jpg[/IMG]