I spent the last two days leveling the hearth in preparation for tile. This doesn't sound like a very glamorous process, and it wasn't. It started out looking like this:
Not sure how it happened, but as you can clearly see, it's way too uneven for tile installation. So I taped off the floor, thoroughly swept the hearth, and had at it with some floor-patching compound.
Here's my first coat drying.
Flat 'n' ready this morning:
Now we can talk tile: 18" x 18" Montauk Black cleft slate. Why? Partly because I'm guessing this house originally had slate, and the super-active multicolored slate that's everywhere right now isn't the kind it would have had. We needed something that had little movement, even less color variation, absolutely no shine, and wouldn't require tons of cutting and grouting. The hearth happens to be 18" x 72", and if we use a 1/16" grout line between each of the four tiles we'll need, we should come in just about perfectly with no need to rent a wet saw. Yessss!
We found the tile here. After pricing it through some local vendors and realizing that 18"x18" tile ain't so easy to come by, we discovered that nine square feet of tile would run us about $100-- but from marblewarehouse it'll only cost $66 including shipping. Even $66 seems sort of spendy for four tiles (actual tile cost is only about $30) but, as I've said, it'll save us on wet-saw rental and prevent us from wasting a bunch of tile. And if we consider the total cost of the fireplace makeover to date, ($14: free leftover primer from another job, $4 for the paint samples I mixed together to paint the brick, $5 for the quarter-round that will eventually frame out the hearth, $5 for the patching compound) it doesn't seem so bad. I mean, $14 to go from this:
To this:
means I've earned $66 worth of tile, right?
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