Floor-to-Ceiling Fireplace

When we first saw our house, we thought the fireplace was ok, although we were sad that someone decided that painting it gray would be a good idea. It wasn't our favorite part of the house, but we had a sneaking suspicion that there might be stone underneath the drywall above the mantel. There was really no way to know without some demolition. A few weeks after moving in we finally removed the poorly installed crown molding from the living room so we could paint, so there were a few inches of drywall at the very top of the fireplace wall that we could cut away without being unable to replace the molding later and cover the hole. Nick got his sawzall out and cut away the tiniest few square inches of sheetrock...

...and we saw stone behind it! We were still uncertain of the condition of the stone, so we left it alone for a few more weeks. One night, Nick came home from work and was in a destructive kind of mood, so he just started hacking away (carefully) at the seams of the sheetrock, and when it was all said and done the entire wall was down within half an hour!

Whoever committed this fireplace crime didn't expect that wall to ever come down, as evidenced by the massive amount of glue they used to hold the sheetrock on.

So much better, even with glue and boards stuck all over it!

Now we have a lot of glue to continue scraping off and we are hoping we can use our wire brush attachment for our drill to remove as much of the soot from the top half and paint from the bottom half so they'll both look cleaner and newer. Even the crummy painted-white mantel looks nicer already just with that one change! I really can't imagine why anyone would ever make a decision like this, but clearly this house is full of bad ideas! Luckily we came along to rescue it from bad taste hell!

Curb Appeal

I never actually looked at our curbs until after we moved in. I didn't notice them even a little until someone pointed them out to me. As soon as I realized the burnt orange horror that was on our curb I knew I had to take action. I took some pictures along the way so maybe I can help someone else with an icky longhorn (or any unwanted mascot image) dilemma in the future.

0. Rue the day the previous owners made this terrible decision.

1. Tape off the border in the size you want the background to be.

2. Paint the curb! I used a tiny bit of a quart of RustOleum Protective Enamel, an oil-based paint, in Matte Black.

3. While the background color is drying, print out your numbers/symbols (Google image search is your friend here--just search for "stencil numbers") in the size you want and cut them out with an X-Acto knife. I did this on a cardboard box so I wouldn't ruin my surface. You won't need to press very hard to get a clean cut anyway. 

4. After your base coat is fully dry, spray the back of your first stencil with a craft spray adhesive. I used 3M General Purpose 45 and let it dry for 60 seconds (I read the directions, yay!) before sticking it to anything so it would be tacky but not super sticky. Tape your first stencil onto the base coat in the position you want and tape a few more sheets of paper around it to make sure you don't over-spray around the stencil border.

5. Paint! I just used your basic RustOleum Protective Enamel Spray in Regal Red Gloss for this step, which is the same as what I used for the base but in spray form, which is much easier for this kind of stenciling. Normally I would go with a flat finish for this project, but I had the glossy version already, so it would have been silly to buy another can just for a different finish. The gloss gives the doubleT more panache anyway. After spraying a few light coats a few minutes apart, carefully remove your stencil while the paint is still wet. You can see in this picture that I didn't tape my borders down sufficiently so I got over-spray. It was easy to fix, but this is why I mentioned it!

6. If you are using a different color for another part of the number, like I did with my Flat White for the numbers,  then repeat steps 4 & 5 for the next stencil color after the first color is dry-ish. About 2 hours was good enough for me.

TA-DA!

I intended to do another double-T on the right side, but I thought it might have been overkill. I still might. We'll see how spirited I'm feeling come football season.