Fireplace Remodel

It's finally finished! The front room fireplace wall is complete!  It has only taken us since about May :)  But a lot of work has been done!  I guess all the work wasn't just on the fireplace, but the whole front room.  I'm not doing pictures of the whole room though since we still need to fix the window trim and some things by the front door.

Here is what we started out with.  And believe me, the picture makes it look much better than it actually was!

We {I guess I should say Brandon, but we worked together on the designing} started by pulling up the tile on the bench part of the fireplace. {I guess we actually started by pulling up the carpet so we could see the wood floor that was similar to a basketball court!} It was a mess.  We also pulled out the fireplace insert and painted all the bronze colored parts black. 

Then the tiling began.  We also decided to take off the original mantle and build our own.

Once the tiling was done, we textured and painted the walls, refinished the wood floors {which was about a 3 week process that Brandon did all by himself!}, built the mantle, added some wainscoting and a false wall above the mantle, stripped the old varnish, painted, painted, and painted some more, and replaced those gross cushion seats on either side of the fireplace. 

And this is the result of all that hard work!

We LOVE it! I don't think it could have turned out better!

Here are the wood bench seats that Brandon made to replace the cushions, which he was even able to get to match the floors pretty closely.  {We didn't want to get rid of these since there is a ton of storage room when you open them up}

We also updated the floor vents to stainless steel.

And here is the reason we built the false wall, so we can hang up a tv, and have the cords fall behind the "wall" where we can then plug it in behind the front of the mantle.  There are also spots for our dvd player and wii and whatever in there, so we wont ever have to see the cords :)

 It has been a ton of hard work, and a lot of time, but we are so happy with how it has turned out.  Now we just need to start on the rest of the house :)