All Fired Up

Today’s subject is the living room fireplace. The living room was not a room that we that we felt should have too strong a personality but we did not want it to be too blah either. An obvious place to give it some pop was the only real feature of the room, which is the fireplace.
Like the rest of the house’s original features, the fireplace was totally 70’s looking and, in our opinion, not in a good way.
Here is what it looked like to start with.

Like everything else in the house, we thought hard about the look we wanted, shopped like mad, and went through several changes in our ideas.
Originally we wanted to cover the whole fireplace with the same tile as we put on the floor in the kitchen, and entryway.


Mr. Tiler covered the bricks with cement to level the surface for the tile.


Then he started digging out the bricks in the front. Unfortunately, some of the bricks seemed to have been put in with the toughest substance known to man because they wouldn’t come out. So mortar was put in the area to level the area.


We went ahead with the idea to put the Gea Beige tile in front of the fireplace. However, for the front we wanted to have put in a tile with a lot more punch.


We had seen this slate very early on at Morena Tile in San Juan Capistrano because they have it in a large display in the showroom. We really liked it but never thought of it as something that we thought of using. One day we were in there looking for yellow tile and Mrs. Remodel suggested it as an idea for the fireplace.
It’s called Vulcana and comes in a certain square footage made up of medium and small squares and rectangles. It needs to be cleaned as dust obscures some of the beautiful colours. We over ordered the amount we needed so we could have more choice as what arrives is very random.
Sorry this isn’t a great picture but it shows how we decided what pieces to use.


This is a better shot of the final layout.


Here we are part way through. The side areas of Gea Beige had to go up after the front was completed.


The finished fireplace. We love it! Later on we need to seal the fireplace and replace the old log set that came with the house.