A Slate Hearth Brings Out the Artist in Me

My current East Nashville project mostly involves a kitchen makeover. However, "while I'm at it", the homeowner also wanted me to lay some slate tile on the fireplace hearth in the living room.

Fireplaces can be really fun to tile because they often the centerpiece of the room visually. For this particular project, I started with a box of 12" slate and decided to try cutting the pieces into 6" x 12" rectangles and 6" squares and come up with a cool pattern to show off all the different colors and textures that slate has.

NOTE: If you're cutting tiles in half like this remember to account for the grout lines. To make sure mine were perfectly sized, I set some of them up with my spacers and adjusted the guide on my wet saw to make sure all of them were exactly the same.

It was really fun to pull the tiles out of the box and see how unique each piece was. Some were a plain grey, while others had yellow, red, or even green colors in them.

I came up with a pattern that would work well with this particular hearth that is 5 feet across. I cut the pieces and laid them all out to test-fit and make sure I liked where each tile ended up. I wanted it to have a somewhat random look to mix the various shades of color without having pieces cut from the same tile right next to each other.

So far I'm really happy with it. It will only look better once it's grouted to make the tiles stand out even more. It was a blast because I got to use some of those creative juices that run through my veins. :)

BTW- I had to do quite a bit of prepwork to the hearth before laying tile. It sloped away from the fireplace and was quite a bit lower than the finished hardwoods that surround it. To fix the problem, I used a couple applications of leveling cement to raise up the front of the hearth and get it as level and flat as possible.

-Peter

www.CarpentryGuy.com

Fantastic Fireplace Facelift

Everyone loves before and after stories, so I thought I show some pics of the fireplace at our East Nashville project. We started with the common story- broken & cracked tile, overpainted mantle and bland.

When we were done it was one of my favorite parts of the house, even though the fireplace wasn't functional. It was still a nice centerpiece to the living room.

We started by removing the mantle. At first I thought we could strip and stain it, but after getting started, I'm not sure that the wood was worth the trouble. I used my wood scrapers to clean out much of the paint and get it looking sharp. After sanding we painted it with the brown trim paint that was an accent color for the house. (I love that color, but you don't want to overdo it!)

The tile was the really fun part. The old wall tile came off in huge chunks. I built a new support system for them with 2x4s and cement board. This was tedious because the depth had to be exactly right so that once it was tiled the mantle would fit over it right with no gaps.

The hearth was easy- I just filled in the holes with floor leveling cement and tiled right over the old tile. This made a new surface that was raised a bit from the floor, but that was fixed by adding some trim around the edge that was stained to matched the hardwoods.

I found this incredible tile at the Habitat Store in a mixed lot. I had been saving them a long time waiting on just the right project to use them on. They are Italian ceramic tiles in different sizes. I tried a few different patterns until one worked. I used smaller squares around the outside and put the larger 12x18 rectangular pieces for the hearth.

You can't use it to burn anything except candles, but it looks great.

-Peter

www.CarpentryGuy.com