One year after the initial remodel of our home, I decided it was finally time to design and build a nice fireplace for the living room. When I bought the house Oct 2005, the brick went from floor to ceiling and the wood mantle was loose in the bricks. During the remodel, the top 4 foot of brick was removed and we put sheet rock on the top half. The previous owner said the fireplace did not work right. She had some smoke problems and painted over the smoke stained bricks with paint. I was not looking forward to removing the paint, but I needed to in order to bond the tile. I started with a coat of low odor chemical, waited an hour and started scraping. It did a fair job, but only removed a fraction of the paint and left a residue that I needed to wash off. I decided to finish the job with a pressure washer. Containing the water would be a challenge. I built an enclosure to contain the water and made a drain pan that would empty out the ash dump in bottom of the fireplace to the outside. I hooked up a wet vac to a hole cut in the plastic drain pan to suck out the water. Overall it worked fairly well.  The end result after pressure washing was an excellent surface for setting the tile.  However I noticed that the top line of bricks had a crack in the mortar and needed to be re-pointed. My first attempt at re setting the bricks was a success. I even added six brick ties to stabilize the stack of bricks by connecting to the house frame.

    I bought black galaxy marble tile and travertine listello trim tile from local wholesalers.  The wood we chose is Cherry, since our kitchen cabinets are Cherry and we really liked the look of them. The disadvantage of Cherry is that is is expensive at 2x the price of red oak.  Fine lumber and plywood was a great source for the lumber.  I used a fruitwood stain on the cherry, but it was a little too yellow, so I added a touch of red to it. My material costs were just under $1000, and it took about three weeks for me to complete.  Finally I repainted the old doors and installed them.