This past weekend was an interesting one. We tried something for the first time… tiling! Ok, so I’m sorry, but I can’t be the only one who thought that tiling something small would be super simple. I mean the tile comes on sheets.. you lay some glue.. stick it down.. and then grout.. & voila, you have a tiled surface. No. No. No. It doesn’t work like that. It’s actually quite the process & as first timers we learned a lot. It was actually hard even before we started laying the tile.. picking out the tile was awful. There are so many options & I honestly was stuck between brick, subway tile, penny tile, & the list goes on. We ended up going with a classic octagon marble tile against what most people suggested we do [majority said subway tile, which I loved as well], but my heart was just drawn to the classic look with the pop of contrast of these marble tiles. Also, when I asked for suggestions on Instagram for tile, I forgot to mention that we were only tiling the hearth by the fireplace & not the entire fireplace surround…

Here was the fireplace area before….

& with progress…

Please excuse the terrible photos that I took at night in our house, but this wasn’t going to be pretty no matter how I took them so there’s that. t will be blogging a more in depth later on when we are finished, but I wanted to pop in today & show you what it looks like before we grout it and finish the fireplace area up. We removed the mantel to lay the tile & we will be painting all of that marble with the high heat black paint that we started using before. We added the shiplap above to cover the drywall that was revealed after taking off the prior mantel. We talk about someday maybe removing everything and trying to see fi we can salvage the old brick fireplace, but that’s a “someday” project so we will put that on the back burner as they say. Anyways, so for this hearth Jose actually built off of the marble that was there to create a larger tile area. Now that the tile is down, we have to grout and tile the sides of the boards that he built out. Here is a little glimpse into us doing that part…

We will be back when it’s done with a full tutorial, what we learned, pros & cons, & of course finished photos. I can’t wait for this area of the front living room to be done! It’s going to be so amazing to have one room that looks decent in the house. I haven’t said this here on the blog yet I don’t think, but we are thinking about adding a windows on either side of the fireplace above the built-ins as well. This room does lack a lot of natural light only having two small windows. More on that later. I hope you enjoyed seeing this front living room fireplace update & I can’t wait to come back with the finished product!! Thank you much for stopping by the blog today. xx