only two weeks

Unlike the month it took for my last project, this one only took two weeks.


You can see from the first picture, I tried to remove tiles the day before by chiseling them by hand. After two hours, I was crouched over the tile, sweating buckets, bleeding from all the porcelain shards and about to throw a chisel at someone. Two hours. 12 tiles removed.

Dustin replied, "Why didn't you just get a small jackhammer?" (technically called a demolition hammer.)

But I knew that if I had gone and rented one, he would have been pissed and wondered why I didn't do it by hand and save the money. I knew he'd have to see the blood and sweat to let me rent one.

So, the next day, I rented one. And got the rest of the tile off the entry and fireplace in less than an hour.


I wasn't surprised when I found that the builders had just tiled onto the drywall around the fireplace (a no-no) and just onto a wooden underlayment called luan on the floors.

So the Luan had to come up. The 200 or so staples that didn't come up with it got hammered down.



Put in new concrete backerboard.



I had in my mind what I wanted for the entryway. Something Roman looking. And after 50+ tile cuts, I got pretty close.

Here they are laid out just before laying in mortar.


The tumbled marble interior frame.


What I didn't take pictures of was laying the tile in mortar and then grouting it. See, in between all this, we hosted a game night. So the whole project came to a halt while we cleaned house.

But my next step was doing something with the fireplace.

The room it's in is huge. It has a 20 foot vault. And then this tiny fireplace.

Though I wanted to do a floor to ceiling stone fireplace, I just didn't have the $10,000 in my budget to do that.

I wanted to raise it somehow and had noticed that most fireplaces have this flat piece between the side columns and the mantel called a breast plate.

I looked at some fireplaces that I liked:

(but I hate that mosaic)

And this one:

But mine was going to be stained.

So I got to work building a breastplate. It's a flat piece of oak with 4 pieces of trim on it's edges. Here I am gluing the trim:


Then I stained an shellacked the new piece and shellacked the old pieces and laid them out to see how it all fits.

Here's my new breast plate:


200+ feet of blue tape and 8 hours later, the living room was painted and ready for the fireplace. But then I put it in and realized I need to shellac the rest of the wood work.

200+ MORE feet of blue tape and a couple hours later, the rest of the wood was shellacked and just a shade darker than it was.

and... VOILA! New living room:


New fireplace:


New entry:


Stove backsplash comes next.