Our New Fireplace

Many of you know that we have spent the better part of this year redoing the main floor of our house. We finished the kitchen mid summer and took a bit of a break before starting on the living room. We painted and put in new floor, but our biggest project was the fire place.
I've always loved that we had a fireplace and hated how it looked. This is a random picture that shows the before.

This was taken right before we started to work on it.

And this is the finished product. I absolutely love it. It turned out far better than I imagined. We decided it would be to expensive and to big of a pain to tear it out completely so we decided to tile over it in slate. Jon and I layed the tile together. I even used the tile saw and finished it by myself one day when I got antsy to get it done. We also built the mantel ourselves. I love it. I never loved my house before because it didn't feel like us. Now we can never move because we have put so much of ourselves into it. As much as I want to be done, we really have had fun doing our house. Jon and I are a good team. He is becoming much more patient with me and lets me do thing he wouldn't have before because he know I want to learn. Now we just have to figure out how to decorate the rest of the room.