How To Clean A Fireplace Without Making A Mess

If you're planning some decorations for your fireplace, or if you lot but want to get rid of the cruddy build-up of soot, you lot are probably wondering how to clean a fireplace without making a mess. Cleaning your fireplace may wait like a forbidding chore, but if you take it step-by-stride you'll neither swear nor sweat. This tested method has worked on fireplaces up to 100 years old.

Items You'll Need from the Hardware Store for a Clean Fireplace:

Plastic goggles for eye protection
A stiff nylon scrub brush
Sturdy prophylactic gloves
A cheap plastic drib textile
A small-scale carton of TSP ( Tri-Sodium Phosphate ) or phosphate-costless TSP Substitute
A plastic saucepan

Removing Soot for a Make clean Fireplace

You can use latex doctor's gloves to keep your hands clean, only be very conscientious when scrubbing that yous don't blister your hands, which volition be moist and soft inside the gloves.

Put down a cheap plastic drop cloth to kneel on. It's a adept idea to take a large trash can, lined with 2 trash bags, standing by.

Remove your andirons and grate and have them outdoors. Remove the excess soot with your wire castor and set them aside. If your andirons are brass, y'all can polish them with a brass polish such Brasso, if you like. If the grate and/or the andirons are black, y'all tin can restore their look to new with a spray paint appropriate for high temperature use .

Making sure no hot coals remain, at present remove the accumulated loose ashes with your fireplace shovel, placing them in an ash bucket, and sweep up the loose dust. An ash vacuum is ideal for this purpose. (Wondering what to do with those ashes?)

Line the fireplace with newspapers, overlapping the edge of your drib cloth. Arrange your newspapers so that they "climb" the fireplace walls by 3-iv inches, so that all the soot will land on the newspapers.

Use you wire brush and its scraper to loosen soot from the walls of the fireplace, starting at the top. Equally soot builds up, you can 'parcel' the soot in a couple layers of newspapers and put each bundle in the trash can.

Deep Cleaning the Fireplace Walls

Put downwards several layers of new newspaper.

Don your rubber gloves (not latex doctors' gloves) and goggles. (Did I say put on old clothes? I should have!)

Some cautions: TSP and TSP Substitute are very caustic; either volition burn skin or optics; either will de-gloss enamel painted surfaces. Read and follow instructions on the label.

Mix vi tbsp of TSP or TSP Substitute and 1 cup of chlorine bleach with one gallon of warm (Not hot) water. Making this mixture in a gallon-sized bucket will help you avert drips and splashes.

Set up the bucket in the fireplace. Dip your wire brush and scrub the fireplace walls, starting at the top. Use plenty of TSP solution and scrub until the walls are clean. On older fireplaces, in that location will probably be areas that remain stained blackness even though they are clean. Get together up the moisture newspapers and put them in the trash can.

Requite the fireplace floor the same treatment. Wipe downwardly the walls and floor with clean water and rags or paper towels.

The Paint N Peel Alternative

If elbow grease is not your thing, a paint-on so pare-off product at removes soot and stains from fireplace brick, stone and marble may be more your style. Paint Due north Peel Fireplace Cleaner takes the scrubbing out of the fireplace cleaning task.

Before and after cleaning with Paint N Peel.