It has been a busy day with work, rehearsal and then moving stuff around in the dining room, foyer and living room to prepare for the painting that will start tomorrow.

The great news is that the fireplace is done!!! The guys were here and finished installing all the river rock, installed the hearth and then grouted the whole thing. As Tony the Tiger would say "It's GREAT!!!"

I also took another picture of the mantle from a higher vantage point to give you a better sense of the size of this thing. It's huge and looks fantastic. I can't wait to have the room painted to see what it looks like with the new color. Robert from Ideal Building suggested ripping out the carpet and putting in a maple hardwood flooring in this room. The whole first floor (except the formal living room) so I am not sure. Nonetheless, he is going to price it for us and we will decide before we move stuff back in. The one thing I am realizing now, is that our art deco furniture that goes in this room may not fit in this room now (!!!). What to do?

Anyway, as I mentioned the painting will start tomorrow and between the first floor painting, master bathroom touch ups and the exterior painting of the house and garage door - we hope to have that all done by Friday. Yipee!!!

That is all for now. Look for my next post with pictures of the new wall color.

Well they started putting up the river rock today on the fireplace. I came home from work to find the workers still here as they were just cleaning up for the day. They installed the log mantle, which looks incredible. The top of the mantle is about 5'8" off the ground and is exactly what we had in mind when we designed the fireplace.

As for the river rock, they got about two thirds of the rock done. So tomorrow, they will continue with the river rock installation, put in the stone hearth and some finishing touches and they will be done. Then on Wednesday, the painting for our living room and dining room will start.

It is going to look great!!

A week has gone by since Gary and I finished the tile backsplash in the kitchen. Slate tiles are VERY sensitive and one false cut can shatter a tile as we learned time and again during this process. It is also very time consuming to measure and cut each 2" wide tile to fit in the backsplash. But what an accomplishment it was to set the final tile and know that we are FINALLY done.

After we cleaned up, Gary snapped this shot of the completed tiled backsplash and we think it looks great. I had some friends from the chorus over this past Wednesday to work on choreography stuff and they all commented on how good the kitchen and the backsplash looks. We hope the picture does it justice.

Additionally, the install of the fireplace insert and then final framing was completed last week and starting tomorrow, the log mantle and manufactured river rock will be installed. This should be done by Tuesday and then the painting of the living room and dining room should happen on Wednesday. This part of the remodel is happening a lot quicker, so it will be nice to have this room done. After that, there are just some punch list things and we will be done.

Unless we think of any new projects between now and then... ;-)

Ideal Building was here to tear out the old fireplace on Monday and by the time I got home from work, this is what it looked like. The canvas tarp on the floor contains all the old marble and the fireplace insert. Seeing the room torn up like this took me back for a moment to when we first started the remodel of the kitchen. Even though it is just the fireplace, I was thinking back to when I came home to find the whole kitchen gutted.

Anyway, on Tuesday I woke up feeling very sick, so I called into work and stayed home. I managed to take the dogs to day care, but collapsed when I got home. Over the course of the day Rob worked to frame up the new fireplace and I slept through most of it - thankfully!!

Originally I planned to work from home on Wednesday as both our Comcast Digital and BOSE system were being installed. But being sick - I stayed home because I am still sick. Comcast arrived first and set up the cable box and less than five minutes after Studio AVE arrived to do the BOSE install. 3 and a half laters, everything was hooked up. It's hard to get a good picture of the system - so this is the best that I could do.

Tomorrow, Ideal Building will be back to install the new fireplace insert. And then next week the log mantle and rock go up.

Nothing has happened in the remodel for the past week due to scheduling and the weather. So it looks like the Living Room remodel will start tomorrow with the tearing out of the firstplace and all existing trim.

However, I didn't want to go TWO WEEKS without a post, so instead here are three pictures around the house.

The first is an Artsy-Fartsy picture of our tile backsplash against the granite.

Next up is a picture from our living room with the Glass Blocks in view. Well actually only half of them are in view as Gary and I removed have of the glass blocks and remove the rest today as well. You can see the remnants of the glass block track on the pass-through. Additionally you can see Lucy and Abbey off to the left as they are curious to what I am doing.

Speaking of Abbey and Lucy, here is a cute picture of them that I took this morning as they waited patiently to come inside from the rainy weather outside.


That's all for now. Have a great week and look back often as I may have more frequent posts due to the remodel that is about to start.

Happy March! Since last week not too much has happened. We were hoping for the exterior painting of the garage door and around the windows to be done this past week, but due to the weather that was all delayed.

What was able to happen was that Ideal Building was able to frame the mirror in the bathroom and finished up securing the fixtures in our shower. Outside of that, Gary and I got a lot of work done in the house this weekend. First we moved all the furniture and stuff that has been stored in the Living Room since October into the garage or the crawl space. We took pictures of our old TV Room sofa, chair, and coffee table. We plan to sell those on craigslist soon.


Now that the living room has been cleared out, Ideal Building will start the remodel of this room (including replacing the fireplace) early next week. The carpet will stay but we will replace all of the trim with the knotty pine and paint the walls in this room and the dining room.

Finally, we spent a lot of hours (up until 11pm on Sunday) tiling up the backsplash from the original 6 inch height all the way up the walls underneath the cabinets. You can see how far we went up behind the coffee maker. We cut slate tile into 2 X 12 inch strips and then stacked them up the wall.

We went as far as we could around the tv as we had to stop to allow Paramatrix to install the window sill granite. Speaking of that, Paramatrix was supposed to come out last Thursday to install the granite that broke the first time they were out a month ago. However they called Robert Thursday morning to say they broke the replacement granite at the factory and promised they would be out the next day. Friday came and went with no appearance of Paramatrix. I called Ideal Building, they called Paramatrix, Paramatrix said they called us (they didn't) blah, blah, blah... Anyway - the showed up on Monday and you will notice that the granite is in the picture above. With that done, Ideal Buidling can come back out and reframe the window and the kitchen will be done.

We plan to finish the backsplash this weekend - and look forward to the next phase of our remodel.