Dave is the Man

Tearing down walls, poring over cracked walls for weeks until they're silky smooth, constructing arches in doorways, erecting closets out of thin air....not nearly as impressive as building our mantle.  I can't articulate why this remains the most impressive thing I've seen Dave do in our house so far, but it is.  And it only took him two pieces of dentil trim from the Depot.  Here is the original.

The original fireplace had that lovely brick border that needed to be covered up.  I also wanted those sconces torn out of the wall and I'm sure I'll regret that some day.  To be fair, the wires were covered in shredded twine so I'm not sure how long they would have worked before burning our house to the ground.

This was our first encounter with tile and it made my head spin.  I don't know if you know this, but grout comes in colors.  Picking out the tile was hard enough.  Can't they just make grout-colored grout?  These decisions tend to paralyze me enough to never finish a project.  We took the easy way out and got white tiles with slightly gold, antiqued edges and grout that the lady at the tile store recommended.  We figured we could always throw her under the bus if we didn't like it.  As all things in this house, tiling was a first for me.  Not as easy as it looks on TV.  Even with the mesh backing, they're far from perfectly flush.  We'd just finished the tile and were nearly enjoying our collaborative efforts until I stepped on the wet tile and smooshed them all around.  It's fine.  You can't see it from the pictures and that's all that counts, right?  You're not even looking at the tile because you're distracted by the enormous porcelain deer head.  I know it.

 

The deer head remains nameless, but I'm open to suggestions.  It's a conversation piece.  Not everyone enjoys it as much as we do, but most people are amused and kind about it.  We didn't buy it as a joke.  I repeat, we didn't buy it as a joke.  We totally love it.