If you missed it, here’s Part I.

Around the same time that I made the coffee table, I started tackling the fireplace. It was dark and ugly. The brick and tile were dingy. There are differences of opinion about whether or not brick should be painted. I am not in one camp or another. But I knew the brick in my living room needed a facelift, and washing it didn’t help. So I matched our home’s cream-colored trim in masonry paint and had at it.

Painting brick isn’t fun, especially when there is a good half inch depth difference between the brick and mortar. Brick is also incredibly absorbent. Even though I primed it, between the differing depths and the thirsty brick, I layered on a lot of paint before I got what I was looking for. Each individual coat took forever, but the results immediately brightened the room.

I took it a step further and pulled out the dark red tiles that made up the tile surround on the floor in front of the fireplace. They were already loose, and I still remember the clacking sound they made when we walked over them. I’m not a tiling expert, but I knew I needed an even surface to lay my new tiles, pretty Travertine in yellow, cream, and gold. I poured a leveling compound into the hole left behind by the old tiles. I measured the depth – I wanted it as close as possible to level with the wood floor. I picked a light colored, sandy grout.Despite my efforts to get a level surface for laying tile, a few of the tiles ended up a little askew. My mom always says leaving a little imperfection in a project is what makes it… and here’s where I get fuzzy on this concept. Does it make other people feel better? It is so you can tell good stories? “I had this beautiful Travertine tile I found on clearance, then when I installed it it looked like crooked teeth because I lacked tiling chops.”

Regardless, the old tiles were (if possible) more crooked than the ones I installed, and they were loose as well, which mine are not. Plus, painting the brick and adding the lighter-colored tile was like adding a light fixture to our living room. The crooked tiles only bother me a little bit now. And I’m fairly sure most other people (dare I say everyone?) who come to my house don’t even notice the undulating landscape of my tile work. Well, now you might.

Fun Fact: I built the coffee table and did the fireplace rehab the spring I was pregnant with Five. She was due right around Two’s birthday. Five days before that, as I was putting in the final screw to replace the fireplace’s metal grill after installing the tile, I had my first contraction. Five was born the next afternoon after a lazy four-hour labor, the closest thing I’ve ever had to a painless birth. She didn’t have to share a birthday with her sister, and she waited for me to finish the fireplace before she came.

At this point, I sent an email to This Old House magazine with a photo of the coffee table and wood shim mirror I’d made with instructions from their magazine. It was featured in their reader letters section a few months later, the Jan/Feb 2014 issue, and I felt vindicated from Design Mom’s tacit rejection of the space. When I went back to fact check this, I found the email I’d sent, which mentioned our bigger coffee table had been replaced by the smaller one from TOH in part because before, the kids didn’t have enough floor space to wrestle with their dad.This saga wouldn’t be complete without the Tale of Two Sofas. I have always wanted a beautiful, antique sofa, reupholstered in some modern, durable fabric. When I found a fantastic one that dated back to the 30’s or 40’s for less than two hundred bucks, I was excited. A friend of mine had recently gotten an amazing sofa on Craigslist for a great price, and it inspired me to try my luck. Plus, the sofa you see above with the saggy cushion and the fantastic silhouette was also a Craigslist steal. As long as I keep a slipcover on it to disguise the hideous 90’s Aztec print and the red duct tape I used to repair one corner of it, it looks great and serves us well. I was sure I could score again.

When I picked it up the antique sofa, I was so enamored that I didn’t look closely at the springs hanging out of the bottom. Nor could I smell it, since we were outside, with the sofa sitting in the back of a pick up. It was only when I got it home, into my living room, that I smelled its musk. It was so pretty, with wooden details on the arms, one of which turned out to be broken. I Febreezed the heck out of that sofa, but there was no hope. It got moved out to our front porch.

I called our local upholsterer to find out how much it would cost to fix it. I was quoted a range of $900-1200. Heartbroken, and feeling ripped off, I eventually listed it on Freecycle, and it was gone the next day. It caused enough psychological torture (First World Problems) that I deleted every photo I had of it in an attempt to erase its memory.

Not long after I gave up on the antique sofa and got it out of the house, the Chaplain supported me in purchasing a modern version of a classic sofa at the furniture store. Again blinded by love, with a salesman who was more interested in the sale than helping me make a practical choice, I picked an utterly wrong fabric. Our new sofa has a beautiful silhouette, but will probably never exist outside the confines of a slipcover. It pills at the sight of rough feet. Some of my best living room projects have been the artwork in the room. When the room was still golden yellow, I put up a big decal: Micah 6:8, Act justly, love mercy, walk humbly. When it was time to paint the room blue, I knew I wanted that to stay. So I built a huge frame out of scrap wood from the back yard, painted around the words. It’s one of my favorite parts of the room.

Another spot I had a lot of fun with was above the fireplace. After seeing a bold feature wall in a bathroom with uneven stripes of different colors that looked like a landscape in plums, pinks, and turquoise, I had the idea of doing something bold and colorful. I asked my sister-in-law, and artist, to take a photo of the feature wall and combine it with my fireplace wall so I could see how it looked.

When I saw it, I knew two things: I needed to go bold for the fireplace, but the design that had looked so good in that bathroom did not look good above my fireplace, even when I changed the colors to match our house. So instead, I ended up going with a Blik mural. I waited till the site had a sale, and then went for it. I love the results. The only downside is that because the mural is printed on fabric, it isn’t washable. I can dust it lightly, but anything more than that will remove the dye. Fortunately, since it’s up high, it hasn’t seen a lot of wear and tear, but I could see a time when it would need to be replaced. Below, I’m laboring with Six in the middle of the night. He was born a few hours later in our downstairs bathroom. The final frontier, as it were, was the ceiling. It was covered with ugly tiles like many of the rooms in our house. This is a common design choice for people with crumbling plaster ceilings. It’s ubiquitous in the Northeast, and probably elsewhere. The house I grew up in had them, as well as a great number of other houses in our area. Anytime you’re bored and you look to the ceiling to count tiles in a dentists’ office in a converted old house, you’ll know what I mean.

Common though they are, I hate them. Moreover, the ones in our house weren’t well installed, buckling and uneven in several rooms. They were also painted a blinding white. I spent a period of time going room to room, painting my ceilings cream, which helped. (Does this make me a little insane? I fear so.) But the living room, where I was trying to be daring, called for a different approach. So after I’d already painted it cream, I started thinking about other options.

I blame Pinterest for this, since it made pink ceilings look like a good idea. I picked a shade of PeptoBismal under the fluorescent lights at Home Depot (usually I have the sense to pick my paint colors in natural light at home, but I have my moments of poor impulse control). If you ever search pink ceilings on Pinterest, I think you’ll understand what justified this fail.I knew as I was painting it that it had been a mistake. But I lived with it for a few months hoping it would grow on me. I was going for bold, and what’s more bold than a pink ceiling? Eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore, and on a trip to the home improvement store to get paint for my kitchen, I got a can of ceiling paint, and painted cream, again.

Are you still with me? Part III will be up next week.