Anyone who’s renovated a house while living in it knows that there’s always one room that ends up being the dumping ground for furniture, boxes, stuff yet to be re-homed and junk that materialises from nowhere. That was my front bedroom. Besides the mammoth task of re-depositing said stuff, there was the even bigger task of bringing this room back inline with the rest of the house.

Aside from the obvious items, I had no idea what was in here or where it materialised from (or where I re-housed it to be honest!)

The original fireplace had been bricked up… with a section bulging out creating a “lump” in the wall. The faux fireplace surround was an interesting addition…( I know) and on closer inspection under the carpet, the original hearth tiles had been replaced with concrete.

The concrete had to go. Time wasn’t on my side, so I decided to replace it with floorboards with a view to eventually source heritage tiles so that it would replicate the other fireplaces. In the throes of removing the concrete we found remnants of the beautiful original tiles. It was heartbreaking to see them in ruins. 

The gorgeous original fireplace tiles.

Again, a coat rail had been liquid nailed to the plaster work. And like the other rooms, it took with it a large chunk of original plaster work. It took several days and several layers of plaster to bring this back in line with the rest of the wall. I found it quite therapeutic working with plaster. Odd, I know. 

Aftermath of removing the glued hat rail.

Knocking out the bricks to reveal the original fireplace was a very slow and laborious job and one that I could no do at night after work due to the amount of noise it created. After a full Saturday of making very slow progress, I enlisted the help of my Dad. It took him the better part of a full week to crack through and remove the unwanted bricks. Thanks Dad.

Hints of the former fireplace coming through

Now that’s better.

But that was only half of the job complete. There was still the ceiling, walls, trims and reinstalling that fireplace yet to do…