Our Fireplace

when we bought our house it came with a really ugly fireplace!! It was brick, with pink tile down below it!! It was horrible!! and the thing is HUGE its like 9 feet wide!! since its pretty much the first thing you see when you walk in the house we decided that it needed to be fixed ASAP, so we went and bought some tile to go over the pink tile! we picked out a dark slate tile!! then we decided to put rock over the brick!! I love the rock!! thanks to my husband and brother in law we have a beautiful fireplace!!! the hardest thing to find for it was a mantle!! we had the tile & rock done with in like the first month we lived here! but we just got the mantle last fall, about a year after we did the tile and rock!! i knew exactly what i wanted the mantle to look like!! All i wanted was a simple looking piece of wood!! we went to SO many fireplace stores and stuff, and I could never find what i wanted, none of them were long enough, and they were all so fancy, not the look i was going for!! not to mention they were very expensive!! so finally one day we decided to go to a lumbar yard and see if we could find what i had been picturing in my head!! and we did!! the guy let us dig through stacks and stack of wood until i found the perfect piece!! we walked out of there paying only $10.00 for exactly what i wanted, we took the wood home, sanded it, carved the corners and put a glaze over it!! anyway!! i love how it turned out!!! here's some pictures before and after!!