Fun with Fireplaces

This week was a vacation week for us, and I spent my time diligently working on projects around the house instead of going on fun road trips with my sister. 

** I painted the vanity in the upstairs hall bathroom. The paint is still curing, so I haven't reinstalled the hardware yet, so no picture.

** I FINALLY finished painting the shelves for the bookshelves in the library. They're now curing also, so again, no pictures. While I was at it, I finished painting some other wood projects also.

** I worked on our living room. This included spackling and sanding the tongue and groove paneling, then priming it and painting it.  I then spackled the walls where the crown moulding used to be- I used an exacto knife to cut the caulk, but still managed to peel the paint when I took down the crown moulding. Then I sanded and primed in preparation for new paint. I also ripped out the fireplace surround and spackled and primed there as well. After that I taped off all the woodwork, and am now ready to paint the walls- no more dull gray!

I don't have pictures yet of the fireplace in it's spackled and primed glory, but here's a before picture. The black slate is ugly and I detest the 1 inch wide mantle- it's completely useless.

And here's a picture with everything ripped out, and the mess not yet cleaned up. I had to take a hammer to the slab in front of the fireplace and break it into 4 or 5 pieces to remove it- it was firmly glued to the plywood that was screwed to the 2x4 frame. Way more work than I anticipated, but at least it's done.

If you look closely, the hole above the fireplace looks a lot different. Turns out that the previous owners built a box that was smaller and less deep than the original TV hole (which is two feet deep). Our neighbors had mentioned that there used to be a TV above the fireplace, but I could never figure out how- the space was too small and there were no plugs. It all made sense once I pulled the trim off. We're still deciding what we're going to do with the gaping hole: drywall over it or create some hidden storage. I'm leaning toward the latter, but haven't yet figured out how to make the hidden storage look good and not be obvious.

 I'll post more pictures next week as I get more done. The fireplace probably won't get finished right away, as we're still deciding what exactly we want to do with it. Anything should be better than that nasty black slate, but we don't want to just slap something up.