Memorial Day Makeover

Todd's mom and Don came down over Memorial Day weekend so of course we put them to work immediately.  We tackled the guest bathroom while they were here, but we are still putting the finishing touches on that so I'll show it to you later.  The other main project we worked on was retiling the fireplace. Todd and I finally got around to grouting it yesterday so it's actually finished!
As a refresher, here's what the fireplace looked like when we moved in...

gorgeous right?

Then as a temporary fix, we went ahead and painted it...

So it looked like this.  As you can see, we still had the problem of what to do with the hearth area...when we were installing the floors we knew we were going to retile eventually, so we decided to leave the old tile there (instead of ripping it out and risking damaging the mantle and insert).  So the plan was to just tile right overtop and build a sort of box thing around the bottom to cover everything up. So...after many hours of planning and configuring (from Don) here's what we have now...

Here's a better before/after look

It feels so nice to have it finished finally.  I wish had some fun pictures to post from their visit but we made them work so hard while they were here there really weren't alot of photo ops :(  We had fun though!