Restoring the Fireplace: Bungalow Tile
Those following along at home may remember that the previous owners chiseled off the brick front of the original bungalow fireplace.
Why did they do this? Perhaps they needed two or three bushels of crushed brick to use along with the 15 feet of Portland cement that they poured down the original chimney. Maybe they sent trapped mice to their watery deaths in Lake Michigan by tying pieces of brick to their little mice feet and throwing them from the shore. In any case, they did it and we couldn't put the brick back.
So, we went in another direction. We decided to replace the brick front with a traditional bungalow tile front. How we picked the tile and how our marriage survived that process is a story for another blog entry.
And the tile has arrived.
I leaned it up against the backboard of the fireplace. And it's gorgeous.
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Comments
Ooooooo pretty! Where's it from? I like it! I'm going to tile over the bricks on our fireplace too. I've been looking at Motawi but they are waaay expensive.
Posted by: Joe | April 15, 2008 4:44 PM
VERY nice. Very nice. I love that particular shade of green... I hope to have a house someday for that shade of green!
Posted by: Jennifer | April 15, 2008 9:13 PM
I think that's worse than not having a fireplace at all. Which, as near as I can tell, our house didn't. Periodically, I go searching for signs of one, and I still haven't found any...
Posted by: Karen in Wichita | April 15, 2008 9:15 PM
oooooh!
Posted by: Lisa in Oak Park | April 16, 2008 6:05 AM
Those tiles look so... settled... peaceful... just RIGHT! Gorgeous.
Posted by: Aud | April 16, 2008 7:36 AM
Gorgeous! Please tell us where they're from. Your fireplace is going to look gorgeous.
Posted by: Carol | April 16, 2008 11:24 AM
Sorry about using "gorgeous" twice. Note to self - proof-read before posting.
Posted by: Carol | April 16, 2008 11:27 AM
Pretty!
My MIL's old house (built in the 1930s or 40s) had a strip of beautiful old tile around the fireplace opening. I always wondered if there was more under the beadboard surround, but of course I couldn't go ripping up her house. :p
Posted by: Lara | April 16, 2008 12:50 PM
Awwww. Thanks all! I will soon write an entry about my super source for this tile. It was fun hunting it down.
Joe--We saw the price for Motawi and fell over. This is nowhere near the price of Motawi. But Motawi is amazing tile.
Karen--This process has taught me that fireplaces can be rebuilt and just built, even where none existed before. Though building a gas insert one is easier--and cheaper--than building a wood or pellet burning one if you don't already have a chimney.
Lisa- Please bring Nora over for fireplac-y goodness.
Carol--You are allowed to use the word gorgeous as many times as you like in the comments on this site :)
Posted by: jm | April 16, 2008 12:53 PM
Yep, we actually have a (wood-burning) insert in the back-porch-turned-family-room, and I've considered moving it. But that leaves us with either a lovely silver stack on the front roof slope, or having to do a faux-brick chimney chase, which seems dishonest.
And it's not so much that we want a fireplace there, as it is that it drives me batty wondering what WAS there. (At some point half the wall was knocked out for a big plate-glass window. Long enough ago the window has brackets for wooden storms, but definitely not original to the house.) Granted, we're in a region where the cheapest/smallest bungalows were built without fireplaces, but ours isn't one of those (it's very solidly middle-of-the-road), AND everything we've seen with this layout has a fireplace right where ours doesn't (and couldn't have ever had).
Posted by: Karen in Wichita | April 17, 2008 10:35 AM
That's how we figured out what the original fireplace looked like...there are 7 other houses on the street that are some variation of our house. We could see what we were missing :(
Posted by: jm | April 19, 2008 8:45 AM