Living Room | Hicks House

If you dropped in last week for the most amazing backsplash ever, then you are well aware that we are in the midst of a love affair with white marble. It was difficult to refrain myself from covering every surface with the gorgeousness that is cararra marble. But before we held ourselves back we committed to refacing the fireplace. I mean why not, the tile guy was going to be at the house… it was now or never…

Before I break out the step by step, how about a little before and after comparison:

We were never huge fans of the “poop brown” tile. It just wasn’t our style and it didn’t fit our decor. But before we could put up the new… we had to take down the old. This was accomplished with the use of a mini jackhammer. Luckily it only took a few (of the most terrifying for Chloe) minutes.

Unfortunately in the process, the drywall on the sides was damaged. Apparently it was secured very well (a rare thing to find around this house)

However, this turned out to be a blessing in disguise, for when we removed the damaged drywall we found this:

Yes, that’s a HOLE. A HOLE!!! ON BOTH SIDES!!! We had brought up to builder on several occasions that is was overly drafty over by the fireplace only to be told repeatedly that that was how fireplaces were because they are vented through the back outside. This explanation never jived well wih us, because it just didn’t seem to explain why there were cold spots.

So before we replaced the drywall we took advantage of this moment to fill the holes with some insulation, then used some leftover pieces of drywall we had in the basement to patch up the holes. It didn’t need to be perfect, it was getting tiled over anyway.

Then the magical moment of tiling began…

The top tiles were extremely heavy and had to be held in place with some painters tape overnight. After everything dried it was grouted with the same grout we used in the kitchen and the room was put back together.

We LOVE LOVE LOVE it! It’s so classy and elegant and the gray veining in the tiles is so interesting. It’s such a dramatic difference I don’t know how we ever even considered keeping the old tile. It is probably our favorite update so far.

So what do you think? Do you love it as much as we do?

After our initial foray into window treatments for the dining room we could no longer hold out for all the walls to be painted before adding in the curtains for some other rooms. It just added so much more personality to the room.

The first set of curtains I actually purchased were for the living room so despite not yet being painted (it’s literally half the first floor as its “one” with the kitchen – kind of intimidating) we were ready to finally hang them. As the window in this room is a large double window it was extra important to hang the curtains higher and wider than the dining room allowed (hello stupid door frame touching the window frame).

The high and wide sounded great in theory… however there was a slight problem. I had purchased 84-inch curtains these from Target and letting out the bottom hem like I did to lengthen the dining room curtains wasn’t going to get me the length I needed.

After some debate on how best to do this the options were:

Add a panel of solid coordinating fabric
Try and return the 84 inch panels to the store and order the 95 inch panels online then shorten them
Undo the top AND bottom hems and add grommets to the top

From the title of this post I’m sure you can guess which option we decided to go with. We also we’re really liking the look of the grommeted panels in the dining room and how they fold back and forth as opposed to the traditional rod pocket panels, so even if we went for option two we would want to grommet them anyway.

So I undid the top and bottom hems and resewed a 1/2 inch seam like I did here and ordered two sets of this grommet kit online.

We then laid the panel out on the floor to have a flat work surface and followed marked evenly spaced dots across the panel about 2 inches down from the top. You have to leave enough space from the top to fit the entire grommet which is 2 3/8″ total diameter.

The grommet kit came with a “hole” template. You simply line the center up with each of your dots and trace.

It leaves circles down your panel that look like this:

Take a pair of scissors then cut them out. The individual grommets come in two pieces, we you line one of the pieces up with the hole you cut…

line the other piece up and press till it snaps on. I was super paranoid that I was going to press to hard and crack the grommet. Luckily for me they are either incredibly sturdy or I’m not nearly as super-human strong as I think I am. Actually it’s possible both of those statements are true.