Fireplace and Floor

First of all, I hope you're all doing well.  We're still here.  Folks at work are making masks for the people at our workplace who have to deal with the general public.  I'm bringing hair ties because I buy them as cat toys.  Jack can share since he hasn't played with these yet.

I'm working out of our office this week and my husband is working at home.  Which is good because while we love each other, too much togetherness tends to make us annoyed with each other.  Seriously we had this stay at home thing down way before it was necessary.  We don't go out unless we have to.  But we like our alone time.  Even from one another.

Yeah, I never said we were normal.

But on to more fun topics like mini-ing.  In my last post I was trying to figure out my window colors.  I decided after messing around with them that the Nautical and Cloudy Day would work very well.  I'll probably do a little bit of aging on them just to give them a more dreary gothic look but here they are for now.

See what I mean about the colors?  I needed enough of a grey for the outer color that it wouldn't clash with the beige book or the gold book on the end.  I think these work.

They just look a little too clean to me.  Definitely needs some aging.  Drippy black paint could do the trick. We'll see.

I'll admit that I spent a lot of time researching flooring and how to make a narrow room look wider.  So I went with a herringbone.  It's a slightly more modern type but I really didn't want to do all the angle cuts.  Plus I'll have a rug on the floor and furniture so I don't want it to stand out too much.

I got this far and stopped because  I don't want to get carried away and do the whole floor when I needed to figure out the layout and depth of the back wall bookcases and fireplace.

So I got out my graph paper and worked on that.

I'll have an inch spacer column on either side of the fireplace, and another on the end closest to the open wall.  The far wall will have a smaller column.

I pried off the bottom trim of the bookcases because I'll end up building them up a bit and adding some paneling I think.  If nothing else I'll have the baseboards wrap around the bottoms.

So I started experimenting with trims to go with the corbels.

In the end I decided to go with this:

I build out my fireplace with foam core board and matboard.

And glued on my corbels then added spackle to look like stone.

I thought about doing it in white but that would be too bright in the room.  So I got out my greys and started to layer them on to look like stone.

I spent a little time building my mantle.  I wanted it to protrude slightly out from the fireplace on the sides, to bump up against the columns on either side.

I'm very proud also that it's level.  That's not easy for me.

If you'll recall from my drawing I drew columns up from either side of the mantle.  I'm planning on that being wood and paneling over the fireplace, with a picture of Poe and his wife.  And hopefully sconces over the little wood carvings on the columns.

I don't want the woodwork above the fireplace to protrude out from the wall too much more than the bookshelves but I need the portraits to show so they'll have to push out from the wall a bit.

So far I'm happy with how it's going.  I need to get going on my window treatments soon and the chair and chaise lounge.  But I want to have a good idea of how much floor space I have and I need the back wall mostly done before that can happen.

I hope you all are staying healthy and safe.  Thankfully we all have this hobby to keep us busy right?