Well, I call it the fireplace but it is the brick hearth area where the woodstove sits. When we bought this house in February of 2004, almost all wood and cabinets were dark colored. Patti had visions of how we could brighten the place up and felt that at the same time, this would make the rooms feel larger. Since then we have done new lighter cabinets and some staining of the walls to acheive that lighten of things. I had resisted the staining the walls, maybe because I knew it would be a lot of work....maybe because I didn't want to cover the wood....maybe because I didn't think it would actually make the room appear larger. Whatever that reasoning, I was definitely wrong. The staining happened and the room was much more enjoyable and really did seem larger. It was nice. The next step would be a new mantle.  What was there was a board on a couple of book shelf brackets. I ordered rough sawn beams from the lumber mill and let them sit and dry for almost a year. Then in January we built our new mantle. The next step would be to cover the dated, dirty, and dark used brick. We pick out some cultured stone by Owens Corning and waited for delivery. This weekend is the installation. It is a chore but all good things include a little bit of work. Friday evening we spent hours sorting the stone and laying it out in the pattern for the upper and lower areas of the back wall. That is a key process. I really don't think we could have gotten the thing to fit correctly or have the top and bottom areas appearances close with their mixture of sizes and shapes, had we not done those preliminary layouts. Yesterday morning I laid tarps and plastic then started in. I was putting the mortar on the wall and back of rock and putting them in place to our pattern. Patti was coming along behind and working in the mortar seems between rocks, smoothing thhings out and cleaning where I had dribble on the rocks. By the end of the day, we had done almost the entire bottom. This morning I will run to the hardware for more mortar and then back at it. Maybe a stop at DD. The adventure will continue.