As usual, while Ryan is out playing (moose hunting this time) Joni starts some kind of big renovation project at home. Step one was removing all of the twenty-plus year-old carpet on the main level. It was well taken care of before Chunk and us arrived, but it was a little light in color for a giant black dog...time for it to go.
The next step was to remove the ugly old stone off the fireplace.
We salvaged an old homemade jungle-gym beam from the backyard and cleaned it up for the new mantle. We built a form and poured concrete for the hearth. It took about 9 sacks of concrete.
We ran some new electrical and audio/video cables behind the wall before putting up some cedar T&G boards for the upper half.
We used some 6"x24" ledgestone panels for the new stone face.
The concrete cured a little lighter in color than we had hoped, so we put a gray stain over the top - not perfect, but will work for now. We painted the plywood subfloor until we get some of the other demo projects complete. We were thinking about a dark hardwood floor, but after trying a similar paint color we are now thinking a lighter color will look better.
Decorated in time for Christmas. Joni found a cool old late 1800's era apple-butter kettle at one of the local antique shops to use for firewood and kindling.
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