Re-Face a Fireplace

For weeks and weeks, I researched floor tiles online, encouraged the cat to barf on the carpet, smiled when the dogs tracked mud on it, and at last, I persuaded Dad that it was time to tear out the ugly sea-green carpet and install floor tiles. He stood at the computer staring at pictures of tiles, drove to Menards and brought home samples, said no to this one and no to that one, while Mom kept saying she wanted harlequin. Coffee and cream, alternating diamond-shaped tiles, with no thought whatsoever for the resale value of our house. Finally Dad brought home a porcelain floor tile called Ragno Rustic Ridge, and it brought to mind the old look of Spain, and we all agreed this was the right floor. We tore out the ugly carpet. Dad got busy with the yards of orange underlayment that go under the tiles. To our surprise, the boxes of tile seemed to contain a darker and a lighter tile, and Mom got her way with a sort of harlequin pattern of alternating darker and lighter tiles. Things were looking pretty good. Until I noticed the fireplace.

Cheap.

Cheap, ugly fireplace tiles- just ask the cat

The ignorant, evil woman who designed this house and lived in it for two years before we did made so many, many bad choices. Mom says it may have been that she ran over budget and had to cut corners, but i say it's a simple case of bad taste. Who puts sea green carpet in their dream house? Who would choose ugly, grainy oak trim if white painted trim cost no more? I'll tell you who. The same ignorant, evil woman who'd choose 50-cent ceramic tiles in a pale, depressed shade of gray for her fireplace surround. The biggest cost of this fireplace was the labor, not the tile. No matter the price or the type of tile, the same effort is required for spreading grout and slapping up tiles and holding them in place until the grout dries. So why cut THAT corner and install cheap, ugly, pale gray tile in a corner fireplace that is the central focus of the main room? Worse, why would she choose cheap, ugly brass strips for the grate? Plain black would have been better.

Needless to say, the new floor just wouldn't look good when that fireplace stood there staring us in the face with its cold gray ugliness. I took a deep breath and went back to the computer, searching "fireplace surround" and "face of fireplace" and finally, I got some ideas.

Marble tiles.

Mom is a rock hound, and we had just paid $5 to attend a rock show at Hawkeye Downs. She could have spent two whole days staring at rocks--at the first table out of a hundred. She kept picking up a sodalight the size of a baseball and saying, "If only it weren't six hundred dollars. I love this sodalight." There were other rocks with names I've forgotten or didn't hear in the first place, and she wanted them all. Even Dad got interested in a four-hundred-dollar coffee table made of lime rock, and the top was inlaid with fossils. At the time, all these rocks and dollar signs drifted through a fog of boredom and hunger in my brain. But now, staring at a computer screen with one hand in a bag full of Pepperidge Farm goldfish, my synapses fired into brilliance. If Dad for even two seconds would have considered spending four hundred dollars on a coffee table made of rock, and to be honest, it was ugly, even if the fossils in it were cool, then Dad might spend, oh, three hundred dollars for a dozen squares of onyx to turn our ugly fireplace into a showcase.

The idea of "real onyx" lit a fire in Mom's imagination. With her on my side, it did not take long to convince Dad we should go through with this fireplace remodeling job. We drove to Ar-Jay's, Lowes, Menards and Home Depot. Mom loved all sorts of things until she saw the price tag. Finally, because it was beautiful and less expensive than other natural tiles, we agreed on marble. Emperador marble, a swirling brown and black, would look good with the black insert of the fireplace and black grates that convered the vents and air intake. We found a hole-in-the-wall store called Floor Trader that had the best price on the marble, so we placed our order and stocked up on more grout and waited two weeks for our marble to come in.

Dad carted boxes of heavy, heavy, heavy rock tiles into the family room, opened one up, and held a tile next to the new ceramic floor. "What beautiful marble," Mom said. "Too bad there's so much variation. Some of these don't look like the same stone, even."

Too bad Mom couldn't see the beautiful marble looked terrible with our ceramic floor.

Too bad Dad couldn't see it either.

Finally, I said it. "This looks terrible."

Too late, they said. Special orders are not returnable. We'd be out three hundred dollars.

They'd be out a lot more money than that if seeing the clashing tiles caused me to go insane, but I did not use that argument on them. I just got Dad to agree with me, finally, that the rich, warm brown of the elegant Emperador marble clashed with the muddy grays of our Ragno Rustic Ridge floor tiles. Mom made that terrible gasping noise she makes when she imagines large sums of money going down the drain. And so, back to Floor Trader we went, Mom staring down the guy who sold us the marble. With far too many words, she stated what everyone already knows: things look different in the fluorescent light of the store. And with natural stone, variations are so much more dramatic, so what we saw in the store display just didn't look anything like what showed up in the boxes we had special ordered, and if only he would take pity on us, she would shut up. But the nice man smiled before she finished her speech. "You can return this for an in-store credit," he said. I was back in the corner flipping those huge panels full of samples before Mom could finish heaving a big sigh of relief.

It took some arguing, but we settled on honey onyx, even if it cost a lot more than marble. Two weeks later, Dad was carting in heavy boxes again. The tiles were various shades of honey-gold, white and off white, in swirling patterns caused by rain or rippling water. Dad bought a mighty blade for his wet saw and stood outside cutting stone, a dusty, dirty job. He pieced the stones around the fireplace inset, held them in place with support brackets and waited for them to dry and harden. Two days later, he pulled away the brackets. He put the black vents back in place. We stood back to take a good look. And I said....

Yuck.

What happened to the pale honey onyx? This looked orange, almost. Hawkeye gold, against those black vents.

I am tearing it down, I said. This will not do.

Mom made the terrible gasping noise, then said, "You chose it yourself. Live with it." The onyx was cemented in place. Even Dad just blinked at me and walked away.

Desperate, I considered all our options. I had never paid attention to the brass strips that are part of the grates. Long narrow strips of cheap, shiny brass. It had looked terrible with the depressing gray ceramic tiles, and it looked even more terrible with the onyx and our nice, new, Spanish-inspired Ragno Rustic Ridge floor tiles. I interrogated Dad until I dragged the truth out of him: the black vents COULD be replaced.

With what?

Another long, arduous search at the computer led me to replicas of Victorian grates, none of which were the right size, all of which cost a small fortune.

Mom, Dad and I drove to antique stores in tiny towns, desperately searching for wrought iron scraps or vents that Dad could re-purpose for the fireplace. Nothing turned up. Finally, Dad found a website for fences and one had a Victorian design he liked. He made phone calls to welders, laser jet operators and a  man who calls himself Handsome Herb and loves to talk about his super expensive, super high power water jet machine that cuts metal at the speed of light. Well, at some super speed, anyway. Dad emailed him drawings, Herb sent an estimate, and, wonder of wonders, Dad agreed to pay for custom fire place grates. Add that to the cost of the onyx, and our fireplace was becoming a solid investment.

A week later, we drove to see Handsome Herb's handiwork. Mom made that awful gasping sound I've come to dread on discovering that the Herb's estimate was for ONE grate, and we'd ordered TWO grates, top and bottom, so the price was double what we expected. Oops.

The grates looked marvelous. Dad installed them, and with the onyx, the Rustic tiles laid out in a diamond pattern, and the Victorian grates, the whole room looked incredible. So European. So....elegant.

Dad's ugly black recliner would have to go.

The sofa, too.

"It never ends," Mom said. "You want and want something, and finally you get it, and right away, you want something new."

Back to the internet I went, pretending not to hear the terrible gasping noise Mom makes when she pictures more dollar signs going down the drain.

THAT'S MORE LIKE IT :-)