The Grand Finale

Wow, February is over, eh?  Where did it go, i wonder?  Thankfully, with it's end means we are that much closer to being done with our house in the suburbs.  Closing date is drawing near!

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. :)