Fireplace: A History

My fireplace is one of my favorite toys.  I love playing with the decor, paint colors - I've built a new mantel for it, painted it as an accent wall, done murals above and around it, and painted the tiles around it about a million times.

Past incarnations?  Glad you asked:

This is how it looked in 2004, shortly after I moved in.  The walls were painted ice-blue, and the fireplace wall was a sort of mushroom-y-taupe color.  The mantel...was...a windowsill and some molding?  Whathafah...? This is what happens when you try to combine "architecture" with cheap, cookie-cutter housing.

(Click to enlarge, and to read snarky comments
pasted onto the picture six years ago).

In 2006 I finally took down the mantel windowsill and replaced it with this nifty salvaged-lumber railroad-tie tree-trunk thing...which is totally a hollow box that I built out of plain old 6" boards, stained, and beat to hell with hammers and sanders,  and subjected to various abuses by my trusty Dremel tool.  :D


The green is Sherwin Williams' "Edamame", which I still adore; it also appears inside my pantry and the closets in both my sewing room and my boyfriend's music room.  I love a little color surprise inside of things.  [/dork]

Know what's awesome?  Floor tile on the fireplace! NOT!  At least, not when it's the same boring, ugly tile you have in your kitchen, entryway, and both bathrooms, making it pretty obvious that you live in a cheap house.

Paint and faux-tiles to the rescue! Oh, dear...that gray looks awful with that green wall.

But then, I was tired of the green anyway.  And I love blue, so - hey, here we go!  Also tried my hand at adding a faux-bois painted surround to go with the mantel...

...which you can see, if you enlarge the picture, looks like complete ass.  Which is why it only lasted about two days before I just said to hell with it and scrubbed ALL the paint off the tiles.

Except for the floor, which I had sealed well so that it wouldn't scratch...and therefore cannot be removed by conventional methods (which include sandblasting, jackhammering, and nuking from orbit).

When I painted the "Matagorda" sand color on the walls late in 2008, I decided to try not having an accent wall, which I was surprised to learn I liked very much.



 

...for a minute, anyway.  'Round about last summer I doodled a henna-esque design on the wall; and stenciled the tiles with the leftover wall paint to see how I felt about patterns up there instead of colors.

If the design looks familiar, it's because I adapted it from one that David Bromstad did on an episode of Color Splash that I can no longer locate online (HGTV, I fucking hate your website). 

I heart David Bromstad.  And Danielle, his painter. The two of them are the reason I became an artist.  Not "inspired by" so much as, "Hell, if THEY can do that, so could I."

A closer shot of the stenciling on the tiles.
Please to be ignoring the glue smears from a previous [failed] project about which we will not speak. 










 And the fireplace today?  Will have to wait for another day - maybe tomorrow, if I can get a picture to come out tonight when I get home.  Fifteenth time's the charm, right?


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