Any tips for giving a fire surround a makeover please?

MidLifeCrisis_3

Our fireplace has one of those awful 80's style marble back and hearth things (think Argos a few years ago). What we'd really love to do is get rid of it and decorate the whole living room but common sense is at play and with 2 young kids the last thing we need is to spend good money on something that looks fab for them to give it a 60 second makeover of their very own!:eek:

Is anyone able to suggest anything practical that we can do to it to see us through the next few years until the kids are old enough for us to consider decorating ever again ?

We've discussed painting it or using something like sticky back plastic, but don't want it to look cheap and tacky either (like it does now:D !). We don't use the gas fire as when we did try it the dust smell was so unbearable we had to open every window and was hardly economical.

Thanks

MLC

TighterThanTwoCoatsOfPain

if you can stand the marble effect you could just replace the outside surround quite easily and cheaply..... if there is a metal surround on the actual fire, this will almost certainly be held on by magnets... give it a little pull!

I completely changed the look and feel of our living room for about 250quid whereas changing the fire from scratch including corgi people to change fire was around 1500 - 2500 for anything we liked.

MidLifeCrisis_3

Unfortunately, it's the marble bit that's the worst, the fire itself and wooden mantelpiece are bearable until it's sensible to replace them.

MLC