Re-Facing a Fireplace - Part 1

I grew up watching and LOVING channels like HGTV and I used to cut apart the JCPenny catalogs and paste together interior designs. I have looked forward to owning my own home since I can remember, and I dreamed about my future home while other little girls were dreaming about their impending nuptials. 

When we were house hunting (for the VERY brief time that we did), Andrew and I discussed finding a home that we could make our own. We didn't end up settling on a major fixer-upper, thank goodness (who has the time?), but we did pick a house where we could make minor tweaks along the way.

Of course, as soon as the last box was unpacked, I began scheming and planning updates to make, and for those of you who don't know my husband, you need to know that he likes routine and avoids change at all cost. Let's just say...I overwhelmed him a bit with my grandiose plans on making our first home amazing, so we agreed to pick 1-2 projects to tackle before the winter. 

I chose to surround our two projects on the fireplace, since it would be the focal point of our home and of the holidays. First, we installed a mantle, and you can see the details of that project here. Our second project was to re-face our fireplace. Here is the picture of the fireplace with in it's green grandeur with our newly-painted light gray walls and recently installed mantle.

While the tile remains....charming...I hate it. I pictured something much warmer for our gray living room so I looked around and found AirStone. AirStone is a product that looks just like real stone, but is a fraction of the weight and comes in a kit of different colored and sized pieces! We started our project by measuring our fireplace, purchasing the AirStone, floor tiles and materials listed below.

AirStone can be found at Lowes and comes in two colors, tan and gray. I LOVED the gray stones but they were the HARDEST thing to track down! I stalked Loews's website everyday for about two weeks until I finally saw a box available to order online and deliver to my house. I was SO excited! When we got the box, I realized that I needed to get another box and called customer service to have them find another box for me, they were lifesavers.

Along with the AirStone, we would a chisel-like tool from Lowes, the AirStone adhesive, a spackle tool and a hack saw. 

 We were pretty much home improvement newbies but we started the project anyway. Here's how we did it. We began by taking our chisel and wedging it between the wall and the tile, prying them up, and putting them in a cardboard box for trash. (BE CAREFUL! If the tiles fall and crack the tiny pieces can cut your skin!)

 Once we got all of the tile off of the wall, we moved to the floor and did the same thing.

 In the picture above, you'll see that we found a concrete sub-floor below our tiles, but we also saw that we could risk pulling it up instead of trying to sand or recover the cement with more cement for the new peel-and-stick tiles we got from Lowes. We took the chance and wedged our tool under the cement sub-floor and it came up all in one piece, leaving a plywood floor beneath it. We then cleaned the plywood with a damp rag to remove any dust from the demo and laid down our peel-and-stick tiles that we pre-measured. With the peel-and-stick tiles we chose, tile grout wasn't necessary, which is what we wanted, and if you line the tiles up tightly, grout isn't needed. 

We chose Lowes's French Gray Peel-and-stick tile

Next, we used our chisel tool to try and remove all of the previous tile adhesive left behind on the wall. This was hard work and we destroyed our knuckles in the process, ouch! We recommend wearing gloves for this project. 

Then, we laid our our AirStone tiles to see what tiles would look good next to one another and to see the variations in color and size.

Our project is almost finished, so until then, the suspense will just have to get you and bring you back to see the finished results in a few days! 

Happy Living & God's Blessings!

J.M.