Fireplace Surround Mantel

 I have been working on a fireplace surround as a secret for Kristen over the past couple of months. The bricks were put in place last week and final coats of paint were put on yesterday. Kristen and I moved it down to the house this morning from the shop. It will be nice to get the space back in the shop to work some more of the house projects. Here it is after just moving it in and setting in place in the living room.

 

Sam thinks it is a fun new thing in the house.

 

Right now there is no actual "fireplace", but it is sized for a gas fireplace to be installed at some later time. The firebox is just painted flat black for the time being.

Kristen took the opportunity to start getting out some of the Christmas decorations.

Historic Home Tour - Showing our home

Our house was on the Historic Everett Home tour this weekend so we have been working hard the past week (with the help of Kristen's parents) to get everything cleaned up and all of the tools moved up to the shop.

We also had a long list of items that got worked in each room to get the house in working order. 

Here are a couple of the pictures of what it looked like just before we had around 300 people come through and check out what we have been working on the past two years. We are going to rest for a couple of days and then back to work on the backyard project.

 

Baseboard and trim - downstairs almost complete

 We worked at painted up more trim pieces and putting together more baseboard, especially in the kitchen. All the downstairs trim was also painted after filling and sanding it.

 There is now no more baseboard left to complete in the entire downstairs! Did we mention yet that we agreed to be on the Historic Home Tour this year? It takes place in two weeks - not much time to finish and clean what we hope to.