If you're crazy, I am too...

As we work on the living room, we have become frustrated with what to do with the fireplace. The mantle is gorgeous. I finished it and put on a satin polyurethane coat. The brick fireplace needed to be made level... flat... before we could put tile or anything up. Jeff cut concrete board to level it off, which worked very well. But, what did we want to do to finish it?

We knew what we liked, but finding it was a bit hard. We liked the antique Victorian fireplace tiles that were 1.5" x 6". We wanted either green or blue. However, you can't just find tiles of that size at a tile shop, and places online were wanting $2.20+ per tile... plus shipping! What to do. We just hung out for a while, frustrated.

On the way back from dinner tonight, Jeff stopped by Southern Surplus (which is always a dangerous move since we always seem to leave there with a bunch of stuff we never intended to buy... but then really benefited from finding!). He pulled in to look at trim to put up at the bottom of the crown in the room... to hide the gaps caused by the very uneven walls. I sat in the car, counting contractions. I waited, and waited... and finally he came out with a piece of 3 foot long marble in his hand. He couldn't tell if he was being crazy, or if this stuff could be cut into tiles for our fireplace. The marble was a long strip that was 1.75" wide. I liked the look of the marble a lot, and he could cut it with his tile saw into 6" pieces. He couldn't tell if he was nuts or if this was really a good idea. I voted that it was a good idea. So, we left with a trunk load of 3' long marble strips that were intended to be used as thresholds to bathrooms. Ummm... Did I mention that the strips were $2.25? We are getting these tiles for $0.40 each!

So now, Jeff and the boys are in the workshop cutting tiles as I still sit and count contractions. Hopefully, we will have a baby before we have a finished fireplace.