The thing I like best about America is the collective anterograde amnesia. What happened five minutes ago is already forgotten. History doesn’t even rate a Polaroid photo, let alone mementos of our past like, say, the gothic cathedrals of Europe. In America—ignoring the indigenous architecture because pretty much every casino looks like the next—what do we have to show for four hundred years of building? Some guy’s house in Pennsylvania that has a permanently flooded basement. The disposable past is just a part of who we are, and I accept that, but it doesn’t mean I want to be reminded of it every time I walk into the living room.

This picture is not just the iPhone 3GS setting the bar low for the iPhone HD camera, but really bad masonry. It’s right up there with faking the moon landing as mason bad goes. You would think people who control the world could make a decent chimney, maybe not use bricks so rough they have their own topography and mortar smeared like cream cheese on a bagel. This chimney has been doing serious damage to the decor since we moved in. I decided to do something about it, that being a cover up. It’s what the Freemasons do, plus I am cheap and lazy and don’t want to pay for a resurfacing.

But first I had to be appalled. The cheap mantle, which turned out to be particle board glued to a two-by-four and varnished, was annoyingly attached to the hearth. I gently pried it off using a crowbar and found this. Instead of drilling the brick and anchoring the mantle properly, the bastard responsible for the housing development saved two cents on every fireplace by having the builders shove some wood blocks in the hearth. It’s the kind of thing I’d expect in China where they execute developers every time an earthquake topples a few apartment buildings that weren’t up to code. If only we had that kind of personal responsibility ethic.

I thought about sanding the brick—for about two seconds, just not OCD enough. Instead, I vacuumed it with a brush attachment, cleaned it with a sponge and water, and after drying applied a little latex primer as a test. The brick seemed to soak it up well enough, so onward with crappy brushes and foam rollers I planned on using to destruction I went.

This is where I panicked. No matter how much primer I splashed on, it looked like ass. I couldn’t get complete coverage, lots of holes I couldn’t seem to fill, not even with an additional spray can of primer. I would have given up, but the cost of refacing a fireplace with a bad paint job ensured I would have to have a very bad paint job indeed. It took nearly a gallon of primer to blot out the brick with white, but after that the biggest problem was the stench. Some zero odor white paint in a semi-gloss took care of that.

Sure, the brick still looks like something out of a house in a German village from Call of Duty, but it’s a big improvement, as is the new ceiling fan. Add some pottery from Mexico, a couple of candlesticks and candles our realtor gave us, and that homemade art thing my wife made with her brother and the fireplace is nearly complete. In the fall, we’ll add an insert to the fireplace, possibly a wood stove, or maybe gas, and by then we should have a better mantle—I’m thinking a railroad tie or something taken from a graveyard.

As renovation goes, painting the fireplace white was both cheap and easy, and that is definitely in the finest tradition of American architecture. That it doesn’t look too bad is a nice bonus.