While the upstairs remodel makes slow but steady progress toward a ground-breaking, I finally convinced Aaron to let me do a bit of nesting in the basement. More specifically, to let me refinish the fireplace.
Our designers recommended keeping all the natural stone in the house. In the basement, though, the fireplace was planned to get a bit of a funkier face lift. Aaron was thrilled by the idea of painting it a much more modern black. And I was thrilled by the idea of making progress on any single project in the house. Consider this one a real win-win.
I’ve been staring at this huge stone monster in the background of my meetings for a couple of weeks now. With the long holiday weekend ahead of us, I decided the Thanksgiving weekend would be when it finally happened. I bought the paint and supplies. Then, at the tick of the clock to 1pm on Wednesday, I started cutting into the mantel to reign in the chaos. The rest is history.
The original plan of attack was to take some of the woods embellishments off of the mantel, patch and paint it to match the black stone. But after Aaron mentioned removing it entirely a few times, I thought “why not?”
It wasn’t all that well assemled and I had it off of the wall by myself within about 30 minutes.
Once everything was painted, I turned my attention to finding us a natural wood beam that would work as a floating mantel. The couple of days remaining in a holiday weekend made the effort fruitless…everything was closed. Eyeballing the scrapped mantel that was in decent shape, I realized and bit of cutting and sanding could get us very close to our goal – for free.
So, that’s what I did. I cut the ends off. Then, sanded the whole thing down to it’s natural finish. It was perfect.
Aaron helped with the final assembly which required lag bolts anchored into the existing supports in the stone. Then, he drilled holes in the mantel and we slid it onto the new pegs.
I am in total awe of just how great this turned out. It has a beautifully updated feel that still somehow fits the era of the house and our family’s personality. I absolutely cannot wait to get some Xmas decor up on this thing very soon!