Stairs and Railing

On the bad day that our first tile guy quit, I also had to ask our foreman to redo the stair posts.  He had asked me what I wanted our posts to look like and I said, "You know, square, not swirly."  I can now see how that wasn't a very clear answer.  So he followed my directions and made them square.

 And then I did what I should have done before and found a picture of exactly what I wanted.  So he had to re-do them, but thankfully, it mostly entailed adding on to what he had already done.

I had been playing with the railing design for a long time.  I knew that I liked the board-type, rather than the spindle.  I'm sure there is a name for that.  "Picky," I think.

So here is the empty space, just the posts:

Here are my sketches:

And here is the finished stair railing:

Fireplace

I've had a few magazine cut-outs and photos of fireplaces I like in a file for a while now.  It's nice to know exactly what you want.  Makes things easier.  So, starting out with one main picture, and adding a hearth, and keeping the trim in mind, we came up with our fireplace design.

Starting with this:

Adding a lot of this . . .

And adding a hearth,

we came up with this design . . .

And the (almost) finished product (click to enlarge):

I love how it turned out.

We still need to tile the top of the hearth, no, mantle, no, hearth . . .  hearth.  Yes, hearth.  No sitting on the mantel, please.  You'd have to be really tiny and well, that's just silly.  I think I've got those terms straightened out now.  

And, also, that is the paint that we painted just about everything in the place.  It's a nice warm white and I like it.  (I had better like it!)