When we purchased this investment property last year, one of the things I knew I wanted to change was the fireplace in the living room. It’s a focal point in the home and the first thing you see when you walk in the front door. I wanted it to wow a future buyer and make it a selling point too.
Over the weekend we finished the tile, grout, and Matt built a new mantel with the help of my dad. I love the look of this newly remodeled fireplace!
This is what the fireplace looked like when we bought this house. Not horrible with its basic ceramic tile and a plain mantel that matched the light beige walls, but not very exciting either. And what’s up with that tiny sliver of tile in the middle? That was bugging me.
The first thing we did was remove the old tile. Originally I wanted to remove the hearth base and have only the sides of the fireplace meet the floor, but when I opted for luxury vinyl plank flooring instead of tile flooring I had to keep the hearth base in place for fire safety. Tearing out the old tile destroyed the drywall so it needed to be replaced.
The surround and base also required new drywall before the new tile could be applied.
Once those steps were completed I went shopping for tile. There’s a huge Floor & Decor store 20 minutes from this house in Las Vegas so I stopped in to look for something that would work well for the design I had in mind. I wasn’t disappointed, I found the perfect marble stone tile, this is the Golden Valley Marble Mosaic and it has beautiful brown veining running through it.
You can order this tile online but I’m super picky when it comes to natural marble or stone and a big believer in choosing it in person. I like consistency among the colors running through the natural marble and I noticed some of the mosaics in the boxes had really dark pieces.
Instead of grabbing and loading up a bunch of boxes I hand picked each tile just to be sure the colors were similar among them. This isn’t the case with manmade porcelain or glass tiles, but with natural stone there can be discrepancies so I like to pick out each piece. It sounds strange when I tell most people this, but shopping for tile is my kind of fun :)
I’m making choices that will appeal to a lot of buyers so the style I’ve chosen with the finish materials is transitional. I want the house to feel fresh and modern but I also want the finishes to have traditional roots. The medley of rich wood tones and a classic stone finish accomplishes just that.
I was drawn to these marble tiles because of their shape with their contemporary elongated rectangles. I’m really pleased with how the brown tones in the marble pick up on the dark stain on the mantel and the floors.
This mosaic was really tight when installed and didn’t require spacers during the process, but you can see below there were little slivers of spaces in between some of the mosaics which I filled with grout in the color Bone.
Matt and my dad spent an afternoon building the mantel. They built it out of birch purchased from Lowes, they built a basic box to go around the old mantel. They mitered the corners then used a brad nailer to piece it together and secure it to the old mantel, it’s a big improvement to the basic mantel that was there before.
I applied one coat of walnut stain to the birch wood to give the mantel a balanced look with the floor. (I still have to go back and apply a coat of clear wax to protect it for the future.)
I’m so pleased with the new look of this fireplace!!
The new fireplace and flooring dramatically change the look of the living room! (Also notice the popcorn ceilings and gone and the walls are textured smooth and painted fresh white.)
Of course I had to style it with a few accessories just to show it off :)
I’ll have more spaces to share in February when the bathrooms in this house are done!
This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Floor & Decor. The opinions and text are all mine.