Fireplace & mantle: before & after

Bring out the trumpets people. Our living room makeover is now complete! It has been a very busy month around here but it's DONE. I won't lie, it has been tiring, often boring and very dirty but doing every single thing ourselves apart from installing the carpet has been satisfying too. The biggest job in the room was revamping our fireplace and mantle so this post is dedicated to that particular six-week slog.

In this earlier post, I showed you what we started with and our first steps plus finding and painting a mantle. Here are a few earlier pics for a quick recap.

After knocking out the bricks, some of the big holes were filled by replacing broken brick and covering with mortar. After leaving this to dry for a day, a coat of render was applied (below).

The render was then hand sanded smooth (below).

A coat of base coat plaster (below) was followed by a final coat plaster to give it a smooth finish.

Each layer needed a day to dry. This is what we ended up with after the final coat plaster.

At this point, our little old heater was looking worse and worse, although it was still doing a fine job of keeping us warm as you can see. We figured it couldn't hurt to try spray painting the brown woodgrain veneer using the black White Knight spray can we'd used on the chandelier.

After taping carefully, the Mister sprayed away et voila! A new lease on life for this old boy.

Tiling was next on the agenda but first we had to fix the surface beneath the old tiles. You can see we exposed a crazy mix of different wood under there so it had to go.

I got brave and used the circular saw to cut this piece of flooring, then screwed it down.

Next to go down was a piece of cement sheeting and some aluminium tile edge was measured up. A fair amount of YouTube tutorials were also viewed around this time! Who needs a tradie when you have your own two hands and YouTube :)

The Mister was busy replacing flooring in other parts of the room and fixing squeaky boards so I had to get on and lay some tiles. When a deadline is looming, it's amazing what you will just get on and do. The carpet was due to be installed three days later so what could I do but smear down some tile adhesive, shimmy a few tiles in place and push some spacers down? Apart from a scary moment near the end where I momentarily thought my careful measurements were off, it was too easy. 

Grouting the next night was the real challenge. We'd purchased ready made black grout in a tube and it seemed to get dry quickly and feel like it was setting before I could smooth it nicely between each tile. I may or may not have sworn at my husband in a state of stress! But I just kept smoothing it down as best I could then used a damp sponge a lot to get a nicer finish. By the time I fell into bed at 1.30am, I was feeling better about it.

In the morning, I saw this and felt rather pleased. After a bit of a clean up, I thought they looked a million bucks!

Later that morning, we had the carpet installed. It's a twist pile Godfrey Hirst carpet in a colour called Antique Linen. A few days later we drilled two holes into the chimney and inserted walls plugs and screws to hang the mantle. At some point we'll also reinforce the mantle with liquid nails. For now, we are just kicking back to admire it (and blog about it)!

Nothing better than a mantle to display beloved objects. I have already bought fabric to sew Christmas stockings that will hang on the mantlepiece! What a DIY nerd I have become. 

Oh, so much better, don't you think? Those green patterned bricks are but a distant memory. 

  

Mantle makeover (and fireplace demolition!)

Warning allergy sufferers: this post contains a lot of dust. May also contain content that is unsuitable for clean freaks as you may start to imagine that the said dust will sneak past the rolled up towels at the three doorways in this room and into the rest of our house (you would be right, but nothing a week of dusting won't sort out!).

We started with a fireplace and mantle like this:

Bricks staggering out, pressed in a geometric pattern and then covered with a mint green paint...nice. The old gas heater is an ugly brown but very efficient so we are keeping it for now to save dollars. We are hoping it will be improved with a new mantle and surrounded by new tiles and carpet (good bye terracotta tiles and grey speckled school carpet!).

Imagine me taking to the wooden mantle (the white bit) with a hammer then the Mister attacking the bricks with an angle grinder and a demolition hammer drill. We were left with this:

Yes, there is red brick dust ALL the way up the very high walls!

The dust was so thick that we had to wait a few hours to take these photos. Those holes have now been filled with mortar. Five layers were applied over a week to ensure it was dry underneath and stuck to the wall. As I type, render is being applied to create a smooth layer over the bricks and hide the pattern. This photo was taken in progress at 11.35pm this evening!

Don't worry, I'm not always sitting back on the interweb while the man does all the work. I made myself useful in the last week by preparing the mantle, picked up on eBay for just under $120. It is a reproduction mantle that was never used as the sellers had purchased the wrong size for their fireplace. Sad for them, happy for us.

With the help of an orbital sander, a detail sander and a few sheets of sandpaper, I gave it a good sand, followed by a dust and a rub down with water and sugar soap. I did this outside so the mantle stayed clean, which is funny really because I usually sand outside so the house stays clean!

After one coat of paint (the old Dulux Whisper White gloss came out again), the coverage was quite uneven, as you can see here when I pulled it inside for the night. I'm thinking I may have sanded it too well, if such a thing is possible.

The coverage was much better after the second coat, although I noticed too late that there were paint drips under the scrolls.

There were a few gritty bits in the paint finish too so I then sanded it lightly and did a third coat. I don't have a photo of that yet so you'll just have to hang out to see it installed when the fireplace is complete. Sorry to be a tease - if I had the finished photos, I'd show you! We just need a few more weekends to get it looking like the beautiful mantle we know it can be. That means a few more weekends in my painting clothes, my favourite being the paint-splotched yellow and blue Canterbury rugby shirt embroidered with the eagle of my hometown football and netball club. Renovating is a sexy business!

Bonne anniversaire Charles Whyte

 

It's a special day at Charles Whyte HQ as we hit the one year blog anniversary. To celebrate we admired the advent calendar strung on the mantle and the Mister got to check out his treats and notes for Day 1. He even asked if he could shine a torch on the other boxes so he could guess what else he has in store! Oh what fun it is to...

To see how I came to have little noodles boxes as an advent calendar, see my previous blog here.  

A very big merci beaucoup to my small but loyal group of followers and subscribers for joining the hunt for all the things that make our heart sing in Charles Whyte's first year. I've loved getting all your help and suggestions on my odd quests - even if most have come to me via email or verbally. I will convert you all to bloggers yet!

Charles Whyte has, in some ways, been about remembering all the things I love in life, all the things that make me happy. After a difficult year or two, this past one has been very positive and I do believe that writing these posts a couple of times a week is one of the reasons for that. A year ago today I wrote about being on the cusp, a place where we aren't quite content and we're out there searching for an elusive, mythical, magical thing that will make us instantly happy. Even though I know there is no such thing, that first post remains this blog's raison d'être. These days though, I feel so much more able to "enjoy the rush as my head hits the water" and I feel much more part of those dreamy images I wrote about. 

This blog only exists because I'm still enjoying the hunt for all the things that make my heart sing. I might be more content this year but I still have to agree with my former words that "the search is like a heartbeat, a rush of adrenaline, my lifeblood." So Charles Whyte lives on and I hope you'll be part of the hunt.