Hey, look what I did!

The dining room fireplace before...

...and after

In spare hours here and there over the last couple of weeks I've been working on a budget facelift for the hideous fireplace in the dining room.

First of all I painted the horrendous faux bricks white, which is not their final colour. When we decorate the rest of the room after our holiday we're going to paint them whatever colour we've chosen for the walls, so that they blend in and hopefully do a bit of a disappearing act - they're truly horrible. Then I painted the interior of the fireplace black, and finally I set to work on creating a new hearth to cover up the multi-level concrete monstrosity that was there before. It's the first time I've done tiling apart from mosaics. Still, if you stand a fair distance away and squint a bit it doesn't look too bad!

I'm just waiting for some more tiles to be delivered and I'm going to do a similar job on the bedroom fireplace.

Helen