We recently had our fireplace redone! We have been in our house almost three years and I have been dreaming of these built-ins for my fireplace since day one!
I can't even believe my before picture any more!! This has been finished for about a month now, and I simply can't believe the change! My before! Can you believe it???
To the right of our old sad fireplace, was all of our internet boxes. After we tried to move them to a different room, I decided that instead of buying a cabinet to hide them in, I would just put in the extra money to have built-ins made. And since I was having built-ins built, I decided it was the perfect time to beef up the actual fireplace as well!!
When we were picking out everything for our new house, the fireplace options were seriously lacking. I hated the tile from day one. It wasn't what I wanted. I also did not like how the mantle was so small. There was dry wall on the sides of the fireplace. It just seemed small.
My husband and I are not blessed with the talent to build something like this, but luckily my mom has a cousin who does AMAZING work!! The only problem with hiring him is he is SO BUSY!!!! (I joked and told him to put me on his schedule for 2020 for something, I don't know what, but I want him to do something!!!) He has built custom mudroom shelving for us as well! And the other nice thing is he lets me paint the cabinets before he installs them. It saves me a bit of money by doing that myself and then I feel like I helped!
A couple in progress shots! It took him 3 days to install it with putting in the new tile, and letting everything dry before grouting! But it was SO worth it!!
Figuring out what to have him build was the fun part! I spent hours on Pinterest looking at different ideas. I ended up using this pin as
inspiration. We have a very similar layout, so this pin was a great inspiration. Another big debate was what to put in for tile. I originally got a quote for porcelain tile to look like marble and then marble. After thinking about it for about an hour, I decided in this fireplace I was changing everything I didn't like about the current one So it was an easy decision to put in Marble, and I am SOOO glad I did. It made a HUGE difference and looks amazing!!!
I am SO happy with how these turned out!!! I seriously can't believe this is my house!!!
Decorating the shelves was also so much fun! I also had him add in an extra electrical outlet on each side of the fireplace so I could put a lamp on the top shelf. Our room is so dark at night that this has made a huge difference!
A few more pictures, just because!
