fireplace makeover

I wish I could blame this particular episode of I-need-to-change-my-house-ness on my 4 weeks of bed rest, but alas, this began right before that.

Rewind to September. Actually, rewind a really long time. We moved here 6 years ago next month and even though we rented this house first and I LOVED it, there were things I wasn't a fan of. The kitchen was the biggest, and we have since fixed that. The other was the fireplace. But no big deal. When we bought the house we considered taking it out. We never used it. The brick (stone?) was just awfully ugly. I had heard about whitewashing or painting over it, but I didn't think it would look good. And we finally decided to keep it - I have heard wood burning fireplaces are huge selling features.

We have a friend who is just so handy. We had him over one Sunday evening to give us an idea of how to spruce up our fireplace. Here it is; I didn't think to get a picture of the whole thing before demolotion and I am pretty sure I have old pictures of it but really don't want to go back through my files and look. That old hearth held many song and dance performances. But yuck.

None of us realized just how much work it would entail but we decided to go for it. He emailed me about getting the new stone the day I went into the hospital in pre-term labor. It was all put on hold.

I got home from the hospital, on bed-rest, and decided I wanted to proceed. I hated that fireplace, and really, our main reason for this re-vamp was to utilize the space in our living room better. Our bedrooms are small and we wanted our living space to be bigger because our family is just growing. Fixing the fireplace up, flipping the couch around, mounting the TV and ultimately getting rid of the big entertainment center was going to free up some serious square footage.

It took Todd a while. He has three kids, manages apartments, and doesn't live near us. He brought some stone and marble samples to me because I couldn't go anywhere. The demolition started two weeks before our planned c-section date. I wondered if it would be done, but figured it wouldn't be.

The demolition was disgusting. They found a rat's nest that was estimated to be 20 years old (gag), and lots of spiders, and there was a ton of empty space. So they had to rebuild the old insert with brick, which took extra time of course. And because Todd and his dad do such incredible work, they built the mantle. I was expecting a cute little "shelf"-type thing. Oh.my. I love the mantle. I could never have designed anything close to what they came up with. It took days to assemble and paint. It is a work of art.

They ended up working a lot while I was in the hospital, and wrapping it up when I was home. Alas, when Sadie hit 10 days old it was finished. The TV is mounted, there are NO WIRES showing (hooray for that), and I have a gorgeous mantle and new crown molding above. I could not be happier, and Todd didn't even charge us for the added square footage to our living room.

(Do you like our overlapping holidays this year?)

Oh! We made our first fire! And our second, and third.

So happy we took this on. Timing was weird, but Spencer just makes fun of me because very often my timing is not ideal. Actually, it never is.

Can I say how fun it is to have one more flat space to decorate? (We won't discuss the crap that also collects there, including lego creations meant to stay out of little 2-year-old hands.)