The Fireplace Tile Challenge: One Room Challenge Week 7.
Wow, here we are and the one room challenge is almost done.
(To see where we started, click here: Week One, Week Two, Week Three, Week Four, Week Six)
I saved the best and hardest project for last…not gonna lie, I was pretty nervous to do this one on my own. Per my husband, he didn’t doubt my abilities at designing the fireplace tile, but he severely doubted my abilities at executing said design with my own two hands.
Husbands are so optimistic and encouraging.
But it’s really nice to be able to prove them wrong.
So we started off with this fireplace- you’ve seen the progression to silver.
I played around with the tile pattern for a day or two, because I wasn’t sure what I wanted. As you can see the picture below, I played around A LOT. I wanted a modern pattern, since penny tile is pretty traditional, but I was constricted in the way the pattern could go because of the tile layout. So that knocked out squares and left me with straight lines, diagonal lines, and triangles, and diamonds.
I was getting pretty frustrated, and thought that maybe I should have a glass of wine and see if I got more creative the more inebriated I was, but I ran out of time for wine so had to do the whole thing sober. Since wine couldn’t move me, I kept going and let the spirit move me, and this is what the end result was.
It was a good 5 days of working on this every day and I finally got everything grouted. I also got myself grouted, and am still scrubbing grout off my legs 2 weeks later.
Below is a picture just after I grouted it, but I haven’t fully cleaned the grout off the tile yet, so it looks pretty murky.
Not gonna lie, I think I am more proud of this tile job than I am of most things in my life that I’ve accomplished. I now think I can tile the whole world…which I might try.
The husband got a light fixture up! And the house hasn’t burnt down because of it, so we are calling that a HUGE win. Some of our wiring is old knob and tube, so we were sort of crossing our fingers that he did it all correctly.
We started to accomplish some other small projects that I was leaving till the end in case I didn’t have time to finish. They’re sort of frosting on the cake…not completely necessary, but actually the best part. (because really, who wants cake without frosting???)
I wanted to do something in this arch to transition the blue wall into the lighter room, and decided to do a very simple modern pattern. I was sort of inspired by this tile that I love and had thought about using in the fireplace, but couldn’t seriously consider it since it was out of stock due to Covid.
So I got out some tape and paint and went to town. It took a ton of rounds of tape to finish all the lines I wanted, and then realized I could use a black paint pen and a ruler to get the look I wanted, so that saved me some time in the end.
You see those curtains up over there? It’s starting to get exciting over here.
I also saved George for last, but I don’t want George’s ghost reading this and feeling like he’s not as important as curtains and archways.
So…a while back I came across this painting above in one of my art catalogs and I fell in love with the colors and weirdness. My husband also loved it (so you know we are on to something). Cue the big disappointment when I saw the painting was like $6k….oddly enough, that wasn’t in our budget.
So I got creative. I looked for old men on a horse paintings and found good ol’ george. I then shamelessly re-created parts of the painting with my own $88 George Washington painting from Walmart.com.
In the pic below, he’s not completely done, but he’s getting close to being done. I added some tiny flamingos, because every old man on a horse portrait needs flamingos. I also went around the edges of the portrait with our old Lime Green front door paint, because….well, because why not??
(if you look close, you’ll see this color in one other spot in the rooms…I’ve decided I am going to incorporate this color into every house we own (BM Snow Cone Green if you’re curious)
George just hanging out in our basement
Stay tuned for the big reveal next week.
Oh I can hardly wait to see the pictures. And also- don’t forget to go and check out all the other crazy amazing transformations happening at the One Room Challenge site.
