In honour of that, i have one last project to share. This one was the coup de grase to our "to do" list for 3817. It was a project i always wanted to do that involved a rather unfortunate fireplace in a wonderfully spacious daylight basement. At the time of it's design, basements in houses weren't all tricked out like they are nowadays.
The room was effectively a second living room. It was also the first thing you see when you walked up to our front door, making relaxing in the space with your pjs on quite hard. :) It had no finished look about it, especially because of the cinder block fireplace facade running up the focal wall.
When we first moved in, the fireplace was a hazard and unusable. Smoke billowed into the room anytime we tried to light something in it. After a huge ice storm and consequential 4 day power outage, we installed a fireplace insert to make the fireplace functional. As you can imagine, putting one of those beautiful black metal stove inserts in a cinder block wall kinda looks like putting newly refurbished red leather and chrome seats in an old rusted out Mustang '66 1/2. :)
Once we decided to move, i pleaded with Moose to finish that wall. It would be such a shame to leave something so ugly unfinished, when it didn't take too much money to complete it too.
We visited a couple of stores, and finally found a tile that worked with the brown tile that was already in place. I was a huge fan of the accent tiles, and we found a way to incorporate them. Moose and i designed the accent to work as a sort of mantle...breaking up the wall and providing more weight to the area to counteract the low ceilings. I hope that it keeps the craftsman feel we tried to intro to the house.
What do you think?
I hope the new owners will enjoy it very much, and i hope we use this lesson as a reminder to do home improvement before you leave, so you can reap the rewards of your labour and enjoy your creativity. :)
