The office

With working from home being a reality for many months where I sat at a kitchen table, we wanted to ensure that I had a proper space to work and that Paul had an office space when he needed to do some work at home. For us there was no need for a formal sitting room. The main living room space was great and open and we added the large room downstairs that will hopefully eventually be one of the main entertaining spaces of the house. It seemed only natural to make the space with a fireplace an office.

As I mentioned previously we widened the entrance and Paul built the beautiful slider door. By closing off the doorway to the kitchen it made the room truly its own space. We made the decision to widen the doorway because we knew we wanted the fireplace to be focal point that people could see when you walked in even before we knew what we would do to it.

All we knew is that we didn’t want what it was when we moved in. From the outside you could tell there was brick underneath the tiles. The tiles were cut an arranged into some sort of sunshine pattern complete with bird stickers on the windows beside. Paul decided he was going to remove the tiles. Well removing the tiles was easy, Paul will have a scar an his arm forever to tell you how quickly they came flying off. But if you have ever put down tile you would know that it requires mortar, usually a thinset tile mortar or some sort of tile adhesive. Even if you haven’t done anything with tile I think you can imagine, it does not come off easily. Even though the tile is removed you are left with a layer of this mortar.

We had no room in our budget to do much to this fireplace so I got to work trying to find a solution. I contacted contractors, masons, builders, concrete people just to get a sense if this was something we could hire some for and what it might look like. I searched online to see if there might be some sort of acid that might work to remove it. I also thought maybe I could use a big grinder for the whole thing. Basically all I heard back was it was either not possible to get back the brick or it would be expensive. The only way to do it would be to chisel it away and even then you risk damaging the brick. To hire someone to do it would take hours and be so expensive even if someone was willing to take it on.

So I asked Paul to buy me some chisels because I at least wanted to try. I wasn’t sure what kind of chisels but we figured maybe the bigger the better. He bought me a few and one Saturday I got to work. It was tough and it was slow, after a couple of hours I had managed to do only a small area. It was pretty defeating I am not going to lie. After that first day I had everyone telling me I was wasting my time, that I would never be able to do the whole thing and that it was going to look terrible. My dad, Paul’s dad and some of the contractors all thought it was never going to happen. Paul somehow always had faith in me. I guess all those people forgot that when I am told I can’t do something that is usually what drives me to get it done.

I realized quite quickly that I may need smaller chisels to get the thinset out of the gaps between the bricks, not just the face of the bricks. I ended up with a whole chisel set, but the little 10 mm chisel ended up being the one I used the most. Most evenings after work I would come and work a couple hours until it got too dark, which in the winter is pretty early because we didn’t have lights and the work lights only helped so much. Then finally the weekend came and I had lots more hours of day light. The best was one of the contractors would always check back and told me he tried to do some on his lunch break and gave up after 10 minutes because it was too tough…

I started in mid December and as the days went on it all started to blur. Christmas? Chiselmas. New Years day? Happy new chisel! My birthday? Chiselling! I chiselled on my back, on my stomach, on ladders, upside down and sideways. Several times my hands got stuck in the shape of claws from holding the hammer in one hand on the chisel in the other. I and the floor was almost always covered in small chunks of thinset and dust. My dad once sharped the trusty 10 mm chisel but ended up injuring himself and didn’t tell anyone for days! (That’s just one of the 5 or so times something bad happened to him during this reno, to be honest I could probably do a whole blog post about that…)

As I has worked my way up to the top I found the reason this fireplace has been covered. Because one brick was very damaged. Hours and hours or work and for a moment I thought it might be all for nothing. It turned out that because the thinset was put over top of it, I chiselled it down enough to look about the size of a brick and kept going. Because I had left some thinset in some of the grooves of the bricks, the spot with the damaged brick really didn’t look out of place. After over 32 hours of chiselling I had done it. Paul came in after with a grinder to really get the spot under the hearth and to even things out a little. After that all I had to do was seal it with a special product for brick. We already had a piece of wood for the mantel that had been found on the property, parts of which also were used to from out the larger entrance that the slider is mounted to. We added stain to all of them to be the same colour.

The fire place was then brilliantly framed out with trim pieces that were then painted the same colour as the ceiling and the walls to really make it look complete. All that is left now is to finish the hearth. I am in no rush to do this as same as before we still have no budget to complete this fireplace..

At the end of the day, this has turned out to be one of many people’s favourite things about this house. My dad has told me several times that he never expected it to turn out this great and that it really does look good. It was exhausting and I stopped counting how many times I hammered my hand instead of the chisel, but it was worth it. All it cost was the price of the chisels, the seal and a small piece of my sanity. But I think the pride I have for completing this easily makes up for it.

It might seem like if you ever really want me to do something, tell me it can’t be done! But maybe that is why it’s sometimes so easy to forget I have MS, because I live in a body that always likes to try to tell me I can’t do something, and look how that goes..