Happy New Year! December was a pretty exciting month. Our early Christmas gift to ourselves was a new furnace boiler. After spending a week in a cold house, it was wonderful having heat again. We spent the month focusing on the living room. We were hoping to complete it by Christmas, but it didn't quite happen. We were off to a great start, but then we had trouble with the ceiling paint. We ended up having to do about 6 coats of paint to get it to look even. After that we got the crown molding installed pretty quickly and then got to work on designing the fireplace mantel.

We wanted an old brick look for the hearth and a painted wood surround for the mantel. After a couple of unsuccessful trips to Mutual Materials we finally managed to get there when they were open for business. We needed thin bricks to use as a veneer over the existing painted bricks. They didn't sell bricks that thin, so we bought "Newcastle used" bricks to cut and make our own 1/3" thick tiles. We also bought the mortar and a sheet of metal lath.

We rented a brick saw and had a "great" time cutting both sides off of sixty bricks in the cold and rain. This took much longer than expected and was very messy. We tried drilling the metal lath to the existing bricks using our normal drill and realized that it wouldn't quite cut the mustard. So we got to buy a new tool, a hammerdrill. It worked fabulous. After the lath was attached and a bunch of bricks were cut we laid out our pattern and marked which additional cuts needed to be made. Once we were ready, Terry got the mortar mixed and we started to slather it onto the lath. We started pressing on the bricks. We discovered that the mortar was drying faster than we expected and it was difficult to get the bricks to stay in place. Our spacing ended up being a bit irregular. Good thing we were going for the "rustic" look anyway. After all the bricks were placed we cleaned off the excess mortar. We got this far before Christmas.
Christmas Eve was spent with my family and Christmas day was spent at the dog park. The pups were really happy. Oso swam in the river, but Smithers must have thought the water was too cold because he took one dip and that was it.

The day after Christmas we went to work on the wood surround. We got all the wood up and tried out a couple different patterns for the trim work. We kept it simple to match the trim in the dining room. After this we left to enjoy a few days on the Oregon Coast. It was very stormy. We toured the Sea Lion Caves which was a bizarre experience. We took an elevator down a couple hundred feet to the bottom of a cliff to see hundreds of sea lions barking in a dark, smelly, and loud cave. The powerful ocean waves crashed in and groups of sea lions bobbed and barked in the swirling current. The creatures weren't as cute as the stuffed animals in the gift shop. It just didn't seem right that we could have that kind of access to their home.

To celebrate the New Year we spent the first week of January painting the mantel, putting the finishing coats on the trim, putting the tools away and cleaning up the mess. Finally, we can enjoy our living and dining room. At least until we get to refinishing the windows this summer and make a big mess again. This month I get to take a break from the dirty stuff and shop for some new furniture. Yay!!!