It's been quite some time since my last post. What have we been up to? Well, come on now, we always have a project going. But, more specifically, and most recently, we've been working on covering our fireplace surround with ledge stone and having a new hearth based poured. To date, and since the inception of the project (well, minus the time spent preparing the surfaces for laying stone such as the wire mesh, and scratch coat), we have 37 hours logged. That's about 6 hours a day since last Friday. It's exhausting, too! But hey, I'm getting some nice arm definition from carrying around 4 to 6 pound stones all night.
Here is a picture from last Saturday. This was about 1/5 of the way through:
The hardest part is keeping the stones tight since this is a dry stack method - meaning that we will not grout the stone. We use a cement dye to color the mortar. This ensures that any spaces or gaps (which are inevitable and common) will not be too noticeable, and you will not see the scratch coat behind them.
Here is a picture from 5 minutes ago:
It looks so good!! And here you can see the beginning stages of our stamped concrete hearth. The border is a form which will give it a real stone edge look. In a week or two, it will be antiqued and colored again to give it a darker, two color tone.
The shelves are made of 3 inch thick unfinished maple. We're going to stain them, distress them a little and then treat them with tung oil to give them a hand rubbed antique finish. I have started staining a scrap piece today to see what the difference will be between one or two coats of stain, and then 1, 2 or 3 coats of tung oil. I and thinking about 'roughing up' the corner edges of the shelves with a large stone to give them a worn and aged look. Right now, they're a little too perfect.
Fireplace Project
Picking Out Stone
Yesterday, my husband and I finally chose the stone that we will use to compliment our clay colored siding. We opted to incorporate stone on portions of the house in order to sort of "keep up with the Joneses" since the new houses in the surrounding developments and area are doing something similar. Our house is a 1978 rancher and in order to get it to stand up to the current trends, we felt this was a good option.
We chose Mainline Cobblestone (pictured below) 
and we plan to use a grey or muted grout color. We liked that this stone has varied colors - some bold and some muted, which will make the areas we are using the stone pop against the siding. We also plan to get dark brown or dark reddish brown shutters and paint our main entry doors some sort of deep red (final decision on this is yet to be determined and we will wait until the rest of the house is done before deciding on the door color).
I will blog about how the stone veneer looks once it is up, but that will likely be several weeks, if not, months from now.