Too much time stalking blogs = destruction in the tiny house.

There is something to be said about spending too much time on the net. When you spend as much time as I do stalking other home improvement blogs, you start getting crazy ideas in your head. Kind of like when I decided I needed to tear our fireplace insert out after reading about what they did over on Young House Love. Which to say, theirs was creepy, kind of dangerous looking and old-- ours was actually in quite great shape. Some would dare even call it pretty. Behold!



Although it seemed like a great idea when we first got the house, it quickly posed a few problems. For one, the actual burning space was only the size of a large shoebox, and didn't hold hardly any wood, and secondly-- it was just big. And outdated. And filled our house up with smoke whenever we lit it. And let's be honest, I'm a sucker for redesigning things-- especially since we have plans on selling this house for (hopefully!) more than we paid for it. So alas! It had to go. Bigger, brighter things were in our future!



It did take a bit more tinkering than YoungHouseLove had with their fireplace, but it came out after Josh, Bryan and I put our heads together. (Who knew it would come apart into so many pieces?!) As soon as we removed it, our tiny living room felt just a little bit roomier, here-- look!



Not much of a 'makeover' at the moment I admit, but I have a plan. Big things in this little fireplace's future, I must say. I have been searching for the perfect copy-able mantle, and I finally found my inspiration photo-- a page from my recent catalog from West Elm:



I am so lucky to have a handy-man for a father, and a husband that doesn't mind me tearing holes in our house (and wasn't upset that we found out later that our fireplace was nearly unusable without the insert... the previous owners ripped out the masonry to install the tube instead... we would like to replace it later, but for now we will just make it pretty-- again, resale value, we would love to once again have a workable fireplace!). After some planning, we decided that we could pretty easily tile around the inside frame and on the floor, and build a mantle similar to the picture. Which of course lead to a trip to Lowes, and some tile samples...



We are leaning towards the small dark tile in the front-- but in a larger size. A bit textured, a bit modern, but still dark like our picture. Perfect! Next step is to put some thinset over the bricks to make it level, then tiles on the frame and on the floor after that... super exciting!

In other news also, we (and by 'we', I mean Bryan-- he surprised me and installed them before I got home yesterday-- my husband is awesome!) were finally able to install our Christmas present from my grandparents-- new doorknobs! We did a last minute swap with color, but I think we made the right choice. I love them!




So overall, it's been a surprisingly fun and productive week! +2 more homeowner points.