Fireplace Renovation

Our favorite project to date: Renovating our fireplace and adding built-ins.  Here's a side by side before and after.  This has been my favorite project partly because we did almost everything (except installing the gas fireplace insert) ourselves.  It was a ton of work, but so worth it.

 Before

                                                       After                                                            

The first picture was taken the day we were moving in and the second picture was taken today.  The following pictures show the transformation in great detail, just in case your interested.

After we removed the tile from the hearth we had to level it.

This was our first experience at tiling. The tile is actually a porcelain that looks like marble.

We weren't too careful about the grout.  We are going to be refinishing our floors at some time so we weren't too concerned about a little grout getting on it.

We found this great quarter sawn oak fireplace mantle/surround at North Shore Architectural Antiques in Two Harbors, MN.  We had originally planned on building and painting a surround, but once we found this we changed our plans a bit.