Fireplace facial...

Ok, so this has nothing to do with Craigslist, but this project was a total budget hack so I wanted to share this post.

From the moment we moved in, the appearance of the living room fireplace drove me CRAZY with its awkward, unbalanced mantel and brick surround. First of all, it was a stodgy red brick mess, which looked like it was plucked from the Little House on the Prairie. Second, the proportions were all wrong.


But as you can see below, my first attempt at disguising its shortcomings by just painting the brick and mantel the same color, failed.







We talked about tearing out the brick and refacing the whole wall in some cool tile, but after a trip to the tile store and doing a little construction and materials math...yikes!
So after noodling around with some ideas, I came up with a very inexpensive scheme to just cover the existing fireplace (no demolishing!)...and to finally make me happy.

To see if my design idea would even look ok, I first bought a sheet of foamcore and cut the pieces in the shapes I had in mind, then taped them to the fireplace. This also would give my husband (who needed convincing) a better idea of how this might look if we moved forward.
So far, already an improvement as far as we were both concerned (photo below).
The asymmetrical design would dial up a more contemporary look and disguise the fact that the sides were not the same width on both sides (a problem we couldn't change, because of wall and door placements).

With husband on board now, we stripped off the foamcore and got to work. The photos below show where he added 2 x 4 framing to the brick to bring 2 of the sections forward. The finished design would reduce the original 4 front planes to 2. And the other photo is a shot in progress after drywall had been attached to the framing.














Then he textured the drywall and sanded it to a smooth finish. Afterwards, we painted it 2 different colors to accentuate the different planes.

I love it! The new design has completely transformed the living room (it also inspired me to rearrange all the furniture).

And here is the REALLY cool part: the entire project cost us less than $40 in materials.

Shut up!

What I learned from this project:

1. If you stare at something you hate long enough (like this fireplace) you don't get used to it, you only end up hating it more.

2. I want remodeling to be cheap, quick, and not messy. Like Botox.

  

Quit your wining...

My husband and I have been known to raise a glass now and then.  And if you are going to raise a glass, you will need a place to store your supply of wine. So I started hunting on Craigslist for a wine rack to stash below a side table, one that would hold more than the 6 bottles allowed in a lot of the ones I was finding. Right away I was lucky enough to find a pine and galvanized steel rack on CL that would hold 24 bottles for only $10.

It was simple, clean  and sturdy without "scroll-y" grapevines or any other goofy looking wine motifs. AND it fit under the table with about 1" to spare. Close!

Here's the same rack (but for 28 bottles) that's sold at World Market for $99.

I may stain the wood black at some point to make it blend in better with the table, but for now it works just fine.

 







What I learned from this project:
1. Measure! Like I said, I had about 1" to spare.
2. Some wine racks won't allow wider champagne bottles, but luckily this one did.
3. I need to buy more wine to fill it up.