Jesse is working on a two month long project right now that does not involve me much, so I needed something to do. Say hello to our not so lovely fireplace situation…..
A little bit of back story, we bought our house two and a half years ago, at which point we completely gutted the whole thing. The house had been smoked in since it was built in 1930, and there was duct tape in the shower because all of the tile had rotted off. So, yea, the fireplace was not a priority. Now that our house is mostly finished, and we put this wood burning stove in last fall, I wanted to show this area some love. Not to mention the fact that you need a certain amount of fire proof clearance around a wood burning stove, which we clearly did not have. Hot embers falling on your hardwood floor is probably not the safest thing in the world……
I tried to clean the brick a while back, which was unsuccessful. The stove is black, so I decided to paint the brick white to brighten everything up. Next step was picking something for the floor. As we browsed photos on the internet, we immediately fell in love with a brick herringbone pattern. We wanted it to be actual brick, but a veneer because it needed to be thin, and in 2×10. Well this pretty much does not exist, unless you want to pay a million dollars to have brick tile hand made for you. This is a hearth, it gets really dirty, which is not something we were willing to spend tons of money on. When you are renovating a home these are the things you have to think about, what am I willing to splurge on, and what am I not willing to splurge on? A real brick veneer exists, but not in 2×10. I had to have 2×10. Herringbone does not look nearly as cool in 4×8. So, we found this great porcelain tile online that really looks like brick, and comes in our magical size. The flooring store we use carries this brand of tile, and while they did not have it for us to see in person, they could order it for us. It kind of stinks to buy something without seeing it in person first, but sometimes that is what you have to do. Jesse had to build the area up with certain things that are fireproof and have R values and all of these things that I let him deal with, so it is slightly raised, which I kind of like. We still need to put up some kind of trim around the edge, but other than that it is done!
For reference. Here is an original picture from when we bought the house. Put on your rose colored glasses.
