As promised on our last post, we are ready to move onto our next project and want to introduce one of the features of this blog that we are most excited about!  If you checked out our The People and The House page, you know that throughout this process we are going to be asking you, our readers, to help us make some of the tough decisions.  You will be doing us a huge favor if you take some of the responsibility off of our hands and hopefully it will be a little more fun for you, our readers, if at the end of it all you know that you helped make this house into exactly what it becomes.  (That said, if it ends up being a total mess, we will have lots of people to share the blame with. Just kidding! It will all work out!)

The left side of the dining room

The right side of the dining room

So, instead of continuing our house tour through the upstairs of our house, we are going to stay downstairs and focus on the dining room because we plan to start a pretty big project there this weekend*, the thing is, we aren’t sure yet exactly what we will be doing. That is where you come in! (*Disclaimer: Ronan and I tend to take the relaxed approach to planning for anything and everything. This can be kind of annoying to other people and it tends to cause timelines to be completely inaccurate. Therefore, anytime I throw an idea about time out there, consider it a maybe thing instead of a for sure thing.  It will spare you A LOT of disappointment.)

The Project:

The “stove wall” of our dining room

Originally, we had hoped we would knock out the brick behind the stove and find the remains of an old fireplace.  However, when we took the bricks out, we discovered that particular chimney was never made to accommodate a fireplace.  So, we decided to replace the old stove which was inefficient and not great to look at.  After a lot of consideration, we decided to get a navy blue Vermont Castings Radiance propane stove.  It is extremely easy to maintain compared to a fireplace or a wood burning stove and while we do miss the smell of burning wood, we don’t miss going outside to collect the logs on freezing cold mornings. This stove also throws a ton of heat which is really important since we haven’t put any radiators upstairs yet, so the only heat we get up there is whatever finds its way from the first floor. So, we are loving this particular stove!

I hope you are able to focus on the stove and area around it instead of the power cord that I forgot to unplug in this picture…

What we don’t love is a lot of what is going on around it.  Both the floor under it and the wall behind it need attention.  The old mantle that surrounds it is simple, but it is something that we really like and would like to keep.  We also have plans to build low built-in shelving units on either side of the mantle and think it makes a lot of sense to bump out the mantle at least 1 foot so that the built-ins can attach to either side of it.  Taking the mantle out from the wall a little will also make the stove sit back into it, instead of sticking out into the room and looking odd.  We are sure that we want to do everything mentioned above, but there is still a lot to decide on and that is what we are asking you to help with.

The Plan:

After searching through lots of pictures, primarily on Pinterest and other blogs, we have decided that we would like to do one of the two following options and we would like our readers to decide which one they think would look the best.  I apologize in advance for my lack of fancy photo/drawing skills because if I had those, this process would be much easier. It is going to take A LOT of imagination to picture what I am about to describe, but do your best and then ask questions for clarification if that helps at all (did you say that part to yourself in a teacher voice too?)

Option 1- Joanna Gaines Style (Did someone say shiplap?)

Image from twelveonmain.com

This one is going first because this beautiful picture shows almost exactly what we would like to do if option #1 is the winner.  It is not going first because I like it more than the other option.  Nor did I just type that last statement because I like the other option more.  I am a neutral party.  The choice is yours. Moving on…

The mantle/stove area in their picture is actually really similar to what we would need to do to ours.  See how the mantle has been bumped out to surround the stove?  We like that and plan on doing that regardless of which option is chosen.  This option requires us to shiplap (FYI: shiplap is defined by dictionary.com as “siding consisting of boards with rabbets cut in their long edges so that adjoining boards will fit together to form a flush joint”) all of the area below the mantle, as well as the area above it.  If you like shiplap (or have ever wondered what kind of shampoo Joanna uses to make her hair THAT shiny) this option is for you!

Option #2- Brick will do the trick (Keepin’ it classic)

Image from thegritandpolish.com

Ok, this one takes a little more imagination! I was inspired by the picture above because the bloggers were able to use century-old brick to make their fireplace look so beautiful. Well, it just so happens that we have a random chimney in our kitchen and upstairs playroom that is made of really old brick and needs to come out.  That is where option #2 comes in. Keep in mind that our finished product would be a lot different from the one pictured because we have a freestanding stove instead of an insert, so you will still be able to see behind the stove. There will be fewer rows of brick between the stove and the mantle than there are in this picture, but there will be lots of visible brick behind the woodstove. Also, our mantle will go around the sides of the brick. There is even a little talk about making a herringbone pattern with the brick, but we don’t want to promise that yet in case it doesn’t work out.  If you want some ideas of what that could potentially look like, type “herringbone brick woodstove” into a google image search.

Decisions, decisions…

So those are the two choices.  We will end the voting 24 hours after it starts : ) 

We hope to update the blog this weekend and let you know how it is going! Thanks so much for checking in and helping us with these tough decisions! Now we will just sit in suspense over here and hope all of you like the same option that we do. Just kidding, again!