Finishing up the fireplace

We've been making a big push to get the bear pit finished, seeing as how we've been living here for a little over nine months now, and we're STILL decamped almost entirely in the family room at the back of the house. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, what with the awesomely warm wood stove, and the proximity to the kitchen (which is where we store the beer, of course), but as we do more and more work to the front room, and it starts to really take shape, we find ourselves anxious to actually start living in it.

Of course, one of the things we really needed to take care of in there was the fireplace. To explain why, I think a picture would speak volumes:



Yeah. That REALLY needed to go.

We started by ripping the mantel off, and fixing the huge crack in the drywall above the fireplace (as illustrated here). Once that was done, well, we stalled for a few months while we painted the walls, installed all the trim, did various other projects, and wondered how we were ever going to fix the damn thing.

As our regular readers will no doubt already be aware, we painted the bricks a nice latte color, and I built a mantel to cover the top. That went pretty well, even if I say so myself, and we managed to prime and paint the mantel with relatively little difficulty.

The next part, however, would involve an entirely new project - or, at least, one I had never done before: tiling!

The first step was to take off the old tiles. These things:



I had planned to just chip off the old tiles with that handy little chisel tool you see beside the bricks, and lay the new slate on top of the bricks where the old tiles were but, like every other project we do, things didn't really work out as planned.

Seems like the people who installed the tiles on the fireplace were not the same as the people who installed the bricks. I know this because the tiles proved exceptionally difficult to remove from the bricks. They were installed with a good blend quality and quantity of thinset, and the grout was super strong as well.

The bricks, though, well... they kind of fell apart while I was beating away at the tiles. Every time I tried to pick up a tile, the brick to which it was attached came away with it. There was almost no mortar between the bricks and the concrete slab of the floor, and what little mortar was between the bricks was dry and crumbling - particularly odd, considering the fireplace had never been used. Oh, and only the outside ring was actually made of whole bricks - everything within that ring was either a broken piece or a badly discolored brick. There was even a space about a foot square that was no bricks at all, just a thick bed of crumbling mortar.

Needless to say, saving any of it was out of the question, and we soon had nothing left but a gap in the hardwood:



I guess the good part was that it was fairly easy to clean, given that the mortar had never really bonded with the cement.

Anyway, we touched up the paint on the newly exposed bricks to match the rest of the fireplace, and ordered up an extra box of slate tiles from the flooring store. Then it was off to Home Despot to pick up a bag of thinset, a bag of grout, and (of course) the scraper and float I'd need to actually USE the materials.

Oh, and I got to rent a tile saw! I have to say, it's one of my favorite tools to use. It's messy, and loud, and has all kinds of spinny bits, but it makes such great cuts, and the blade doesn't grab at the material, making it easy and fun to use. (Mostly, though, I just like it cause it's messy and loud.)

The one downside to the messy part is that it was tough to take any pictures while cutting, measuring and fitting tiles. So I don't really have any of that part of the process, but I do have one of what the hearth looked like after I laid down a bed of thinset and set the slate tiles in place:



Yes, I'm enough of an amateur that I had to use the little plastic spacers. I read in a couple places how you shouldn't need them, but to be honest I'm really glad I had them, and I plan to use them again with my next job. I didn't worry TOO much about making all of the spacers tight or too exact, but they made it a lot easier to keep the tiles straight, and to indicate where I needed more thinset underneath, or was starting to get off line.

After the thinset dried overnight, I mixed up some grout and worked it into the cracks with my grout float. Then I grabbed my big-ass sponge and wiped, and wiped, and wiped, and wiped.

I think it turned out pretty nice, though:



After the grout had dried for a couple of days, we painted on some sealer to protect the tiles.

Next, we turned our attention to the big gap between the tiles and the hardwood. I checked a couple of online sources, and apparently the common approach is to use color-matched caulking to fill the gap. (I think, anyway. I found a lot of different suggestions, and I might not be remembering correctly.) I even found a couple of instances where people had just grouted the gap.

Neither approach was going to work for me, though: I didn't like the idea of trying to color-match the grout, and wasn't sure I wanted the exposed edge of the hardwood flooring to be slathered over with caulking anyway. So we went down to Rona and picked up some oak transition strips, cut them to fit, and painted them to match the mantel.

To install them, I had to put a fair amount of PLPremium into the crack, seeing as how it was deeper than the tongue on the transition, which is why we weighted the trim down carefully with some boxes of comic books overnight:



Once the glue was dried, I cut some quarter round for the edges around the bricks and glued them in place, too.

And so the fireplace is, well, ALMOST done:



All we need now is a real gas stove to replace the cardboard one, and we're all good.

So, yeah: my first tiling job. It's kinda funny, though - and I know this is going to upset all the people who come here just to hear me piss and moan about how hard renovating is and how I managed to hurt myself - I didn't HATE tiling.

In fact, if I was questioned under threat of torture, like having to watch Oprah or something, I would probably have to admit that, well, I kinda... liked it.

Well, what's not to like? It's not drywall, damn it! Tiling is straightforward enough, you get to use loud, messy power tools, the end result is nice to look at and... well...


Sigh. Fine.


I really like the smell of thinset, okay?





Shut up.