Fireplace Stick-on Tiles Review: One Year Later

I mentioned this in my last post about replacing the ceiling fan in the living room, but for a while we've been noticing some discoloration in the wear of the stick-on tiles we used to give our fireplace a quick and cheap facelift last fall.

In the original blog post linked here, I shared about how we went from this...

to this with a little paint and some super cool stick-on Smart Tiles.

I didn't expect these stickers would be a long-term solution, and loved what they did to give us a quick and cheap refresh while we kept working on the rest of the room and adjoining spaces. But, over the last few months we've been noticing some of the tile segments have been discoloring - either the whole tile, or little sections within one.

See what I mean? The tile on the center top and center right are dark now.

And there are a couple of weird splotchy light areas on the center/bottom left.

I've been fine ignoring this for a while but after spending so much time in the living room and around the fireplace over the holidays, I decided I was done ignoring it. So as we started packing away some of the holiday decor, I took these down too.

It was pretty quick with a pair of pliers. Some of them were stuck on better than others, and a little adhesive was left behind that needed some scrubbing with adhesive remover, but didn't take more than 20 minutes.

So, we're now back to square one. Ok, not really. Just the SURROUND is back to square one - which is the same granite that is in our kitchen and main floor bath. The granite is not my favorite but it's everywhere and I'm not ready to pay big money to get rid of it quite yet. It actually looks much better in this room overall now that we've totally gotten rid of all the orange and oak.

I'm not sure what we're going to do with it now. Leave it and see if it grows on us? Paint it to conceal for a while? Properly take out the granite and replace it with real marble? It's back on the to-figure-out list. If you have any good ideas, let me know!