First House Love: Fireplace Facelift

I know that I've been ridiculously slacking on project posts. The holiday season was so crazy with family and friends and last minute gift wrapping! In between all that, though, we were able to finish the fireplace! Ain't she a beauty??

Now, last time we talked the fireplace looked like this:

To start laying out the stone (which basically came in large boxes without a pattern or diagram to follow), Mike made a template of our fireplace.

And then I started covering it with stone. I would say the template may have been our saving grace throughout the project. I was able to move stones around based off of color and size and evenly lay out all three sides of the fireplace so they were cohesive. (Note: This part of the project took me a couple weeks because of the detailed-nature. It was basically a puzzle with no picture. There were various lengths, widths and colors).

While I was laying out the stone, Mike painted the plywood on the fireplace. It was just a quick coat of our family room color. We figured that in case there were any small gaps between the stones (there's no mortar between each block), no one would notice because it would all be tan.

After I was done laying out all the stones (finally!), it was Mike's turn. For each stone, he took the Air Stone adhesive (the big tub of goo shown in the picture below) and smeared it on with a trowel. There are more specific directions for the thickness on the packaging that we followed.

The only place we varied from the directions was that Mike didn't do an even coat on the back of each stone. Because each piece had it's own grooves and flaws, Mike had to make sure the pieces had relatively the same depth. He compensated for some pieces but adding for adhesive on the back. You can also see below that Mike had to file some of the pieces down. This made them easier to fit against the plywood base. There was definitely a fair amount of waste in this project due to filing down pieces and cutting. Mike used a hack saw to cut the pieces so we could fit them within our design.

After applying the adhesive, Mike only had to hold the piece in place for a couple seconds. Note: In the picture above is a corner piece. we started here because these pieces were the literal starting point for each row. This is because the corner piece affected two sides at a time.