Sunday, February 03, 2008

We're Back!


With a cool new fireplace face-lift/makeover to "show and tell"!

While waiting for the arrival of our new Macbook I had some time to knock at least one goal off of the New Years Resolution list. Not only did I finally make a decision about what to do with the fireplace - (cover it up!) but, I think it's just an hour or two from being a finished project.

The 1950's stone facade was like a big black eye (to me) in this 1920's colonial-ish foursquare. With the somewhat unexpected expense of the new computer I realized I wasn't going to be chiseling this stone off in hopes of finding buried treasure any time soon. What if it's just an awful gaping hole underneath? I'd be stuck looking at it for a long, long time. I just couldn't do it. And I couldn't look at the gray stones much longer either. So, for about a $100 worth of lumber and tile this is the solution I came up with. If it's temporary fix, no big loss. If it turns out to be permanent I think I can live with it.

The tiles are two inch tumbled slate, I used black grout, a birch plywood for the face and trimmed it out to the bookcases I built earlier this year and now they actually do look "built in". Sorry for the crappy photo. I took it with my phone.

Now on to making a decision about the bottom of the hearth... more tiles or white wood? hmmmm...

4 comments:

Jennifer said...

For a "temporary" solution, that looks fabulous! Actually, it looks fabulous as a PERMANENT solution, too!
For the bottom... what about doing slate tile again... but a different size/shape of tiles? Like maybe the long skinny ones instead of the squares?

Amalie said...

I love love love this!!!

I've been wanting to tile between the brick of our fireplace and the mantle; I'd love to place a few random tiles with the William Morris style ginkgo design.

Green's the way to go-- it's gorgeous!

Sandy said...

Wow! The fireplace looks awesome!

deaduser539539 said...

Wow! That's really nice! My parents' house has an authentic 1950's grey "stone" brick fireplace, which probably looks quite like yours. Of course, their house was built in the 1950's, so it definitely belongs. I think what you've done there is really fabulous, and it has a good 1920's feel to it, too.

For the hearth, I might consider wrapping the step with some sort of board-and-molding treatment to carry the feel of the mantle and surround and bring it to the floor, then maybe continue the green tile on the hearth itself. I like the suggestion of the longer tiles for the hearth, though. I think the small squares would look a little busy on such a large field. You could even consider going geometric, and doing something with larger tiles and the smaller tiles in a pattern--another very 1920-ish thing to do. :)