April 06, 2007
Fireplaces, Mr. Bean!
Made some progress today on the fireplace, which we tiled last weekend. The fireplace has been somewhere on the unfinished list since the summer we moved in (it was inaugurated on the Wuzzle's due date). The old fireplace was made of dark red tile on a sort of concrete facade, which I didn't much like but was willing to be loyal to because it was original to the house.
Then a lot of it fell off (a contractor and I found ourselves holding an enormously heavy component of it as we poked at it and discussed the job - he didn't return calls after that), and the field opened.
The rebuilt fireplace was a different shape from the old one, which the old mantle was built for. The solution was a fairly straightforward piece of carpentry, which would have been more straightforward if I hadn't somehow wrecked my biscuit joiner. More importantly, the bricks had to be retiled, and C. and I, who have a similar enough aesthetic sense that we don't usually have to discuss a decision all that much, had a rare parting of minds about the tile.
Anyway, this ended in compromise (I found something I liked from her preferred source), and this is the result, sans mantle. It looks black in the picture, but it's more of a dark green.
