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In the past month and 3/4s, it feels like we haven't accomplished very much. But we have! Or shall I make that I have? The man has been working in the business, and I've been working on the business of getting this house ready to sell. This summer, we are putting the house back together, and it feels like one step back, two steps forward. (Last summer was deconstruction and it felt like two steps back, one step forward).
We're living there, and it's difficult, but not as difficult as last year. We've had a kitchen sink, and that makes things a lot easier. But we brought out a lot of stuff to enable living and we've been moving stuff around a lot in order to accomplish stuff.
Anyhow, so the next few posts will cover what we've done since May.
Fireplace
Choosing the colors for the fireplace was really hard. The colors of the fireplace would have to match up with the walls. And we had to come to agreement on the color of the walls. I won't get into this too much, but let's just say we didn't see eye to eye on this. In the end, I drew up waay too many samples of possible color combinations and we drew squares anonymously around the ones we liked. Ones we both liked were entered into the finals. Here are the finals. The top left choice was the winner. I was inspired by paint name colors to name each color scheme. It was fun. One thing that made the fireplace look really good was a circle mirror on the top part of the fireplace. I tried other shapes and this looks the best. Another thing that made the fireplace look good was adding a mantle all the way across the fireplace. I thought it might make it look bigger, but it looks pretty good.
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That decided, I was ready to plunge blindly forward. The general idea was to mix up a few different shades of maroon, splotch them on the bricks to make a few background colors and then coat it with a color. It took about 6-7 hours all together, but this is partly because I used a paintbrush for the first three hours. Then I got wise, put some more plastic on the (already painted) ceiling and rollered the thing. Last stage was to paint the mortar. I was very pleased with the results.
Stage 1
This is the fireplace after I cleaned it.
I put some splotches on.
And here it is after I painted the whole thing. I still have to finish the grout lines on the bottom half.
We transitioned pretty quickly to floor sanding, so there is a big table on the hearth right now, but when that's gone, I'll add another pic.
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