Whitewash a brick fireplace wall

This weekend I decided to take on a personal project in our basement to lighten the room up a bit and to change the style. After watching many different episodes of different home improvement and remodeling shows on @HGTVCanada I noticed a neat effect that some designers were doing on old outdated brick, whitewashing it.

The far back wall of our basement was a brick fireplace with reddish brick.

This is what I wanted to update. I done a few searches on the internet to find out how to achieve the whitewash effect and was directed to many different sites with most of them saying to use a 50% mixture of water and white paint in a spray bottle. I followed along with @lowes on how to do it, but I didn't fully follow step three and I suggest if you are doing this to pay particular attention to step three. It is one thing to mask off all of the areas when painting as not to get paint where you don't want it. When you are whitewashing a wall using a spray bottle, the paint tends to travel further and land in areas where you would not expect. So make sure you cover everything up.

Oh, and its best if you don't use a plastic cover. You should use a cover that will soak up the paint mist, since a little mist soon turns into a lot of paint on a plastic sheet running around.

Next up finish up the whitewashing only after removing the fireplace doors and using proper drop cloths. I continued to spray the water/paint mixture randomly on the wall until I got to a point where I was happy with the amount of brick that was showing through the paint.

Now it was time to wait for the paint to dry and to do some side black paint jobs. The old fireplace mantle/shelf was brown in color so I painted it black to fit in with the look I was going for and I used a old dart board case that I had to paint black to cover some electronics and wires in the corner. I moved the TV stand, TV and other electronics to the upstairs living room and decided to move the mounted TV upstairs down stairs to mount.

Next up to drilling some holes into the brick to mount the TV and shelf

Progress is coming along nicely. Got the TV, shelf and fireplace cover back mounted again. Next up to level things up, hide some wires, hang some black framed pictures, and paint and mount the fireplace accessories.