Nothing in our house is level.

This goes for the hearth as well.  

Of course.

When we ripped up the stamped concrete, we found another layer of concrete underneath.  We need to build up this recessed area so when we lay the tiles (which match the kitchen floor) they are level and flush with the base of the firebox.  To do this, we will stack layers of plywood, on top of which will go the wonderboard, and then the tile.  But we can't do any of that until we create a level base for the plywood.

We were originally going to use self-leveling underlayment, but after doing some research we figured out we could just use some mortar.  So we layed some into the "deep" sections and tried to level it off the best we could.

Now our hearth looks like this:

We put the mortar base down last night, and we can't do anything until it dries.

So now we wait.

Bye bye brick.

So this is our fireplace, complete with dirty, ugly old brick and paleolithic era sconces.  It's one redeeming quality is the mantle.  Eventually, even the mantle will be replaced, but for now, it serves us just fine.



Anyway, we both hate the brick. Eventually we are going to reface the fireplace surround with stacked stone, but for now we just decided to paint it.




Ta da! We painted it a light grey (Timberwolf Grey, or something like that, if you ask Behr) which matches our silvery grey curtains that are opposite the fireplace. It really makes the room feel a lot brighter.



These sconces will be gone soon hopefully. Here's one in all it's broken falling down glory.



The next part of this project was to redo the hearth. I mean look at it. It's stamped concrete that is very dirty and stained. Not to mention the fact that the front is way lower than the back.




It had to go.  We thought it was one solid piece of concrete, but lucky for us, it came up in two parts.

Joe loves when I take pictures of him while he is carrying heavy objects.  He doesn't mind standing there at all.  :)

So this is how we left the hearth.

One step at a time.

*&%$$#!!@&*

Blogger is my enemy.

I swear I keep trying to catch you up on what Joe and I have been up to lately.

Every time I try to upload any pics, it just freezes.

Sigh. 

I will keep trying.

That Home Depot.

So Home Depot prides themselves on selling like a jillion different colors of grout.

What they don't tell you is that they only carry like a handful of said colors.

Pesky little detail.  Since we, of course, wanted a color they did not stock,  we had to special order it.  It was supposed to get delivered to the store today, but when we went to see if it was there, they told us we had to wait for them to call us before we could go pick it up.

?

Fine.  So we have been at a tiny bit of a standstill where the kitchen is concerned.  That did not stop us from starting a project in the living room....

Lights!

Somewhere in this timeline, we got lights in the kitchen! I'm sorry I haven't managed to post all of this in order, but as you can tell my the series of house-related posts, I have been damn busy.

A few weeks ago, our electrician was finally able to hook up the brand new electrical that ran from the kitchen to the panel in the basement. New plugs, new switches, and most importantly, new lights! Pretty blue glass pendants and fancy under cabinet lights.

The under cabinet lights have sort of given us a lot of problems. Two of them malfunctioned immediately after they were installed. One more just had the same malfunction recently. Boo. But for the most part we love them, and they really add a nice touch to the kitchen.

The electrician only installed two pendant lights, at our request, since we didn't want to worry about hitting them as we installed the remained crown molding. Yesterday my dad and I hung the rest of them, so now our kitchen is nice and bright.

Woo hoo!

So here's the dramatic dark shot of one of our pendant lights.



And here's what they look like when you can actually see them. :)



I didn't take any shots of the under cabinet lights because they don't really look like anything in pictures.