It never fails, with every huge renovation, my husband and I always stop short of completing at least one small project. I call it renovation burnout. Usually we're so tired from all the work, and so

happy to have a liveable space again that

missing outlet covers, paint touchups, etc. no longer carry the urgency they normally would. In this case, we burned out before re-tiling the fireplace in our den.

You cannot see all the details of the fireplace in this photo, but it gives you an idea of the space before we bought the house (eek, can it get any uglier?!). As for the fireplace, when our house was a decorator show home in the late 90's, not only was the original tile painted black, but soldiers (printed on an inkjet, nonetheless) were glued to the tile. I don't care what your taste is, or what decade we're in, this is not a good look in any home...

After tearing out many of the random shelves, rebuilding a few, re-doing the lighting and painting all the trim/ walls - our plan was to strip the fireplace paint and restore the original tile, but once the paint was stripped, we discovered a few surprises.

First, a random green tile...

Then...a horribly unattractive concrete border.

Goes to show, just because something is original, doesn't mean it's good. It was at this time that we entered burnout mode and walked away. I needed to figure out what I wanted to do with the tile and how much I wanted to spend on this project.

After a year of living with the stripped fireplace (in the room where we spend the most time), we figured it was finally time to give it the face it deserves.

I decided on a basketweave tile and after a lot of searching, I finally found a tile in carrara marble with an attractive price tag.

With a bit of demo...

...and the wonderful skills of my talented husband, it now looks like this!

This room is finally feeling complete which makes me one happy girl!