Worried what Santa'll think?
He should not be walking around in there, much less barefoot. Usually we're pretty good about wearing shoes or slippers in the house now that there's bare plywood in the kitchen and the great room. They placed strips of the torn out carpet as temporary runners down the hallways, ingenious.

So, yeah, tore out the gas fireplace yesterday. It hadn't worked since Chris was a newborn. It's a fairly large space so the contractor decided to go a size or two larger on the replacement unit. May as well fill the space, I said. I was on my way to the tile store anyway for some grout and a saddle (threshold) for the main bathroom floor re-do slated for late this coming week. I took a sample of the old tile (which I hated, yuck) in an effort to find something a shade darker.

I'm kinda bound by the 8x8 tile size in this replacement project. I immediately found a beautiful stone sample in a walnut color and I begged the showroom staff to let me borrow it overnight to show Jeff.

Stone is expensive, in this case almost $10/sq. foot, but we don't need a lot of it, just around the fireplace. There's more work to install stone because it must be sealed. I don't know whether our tile guy is willing to spend the time necessary to install stone for us. You'd think if we were willing to pay him for his extra time ... but he's not a particularly amiable fellow. And I don't know whether the heat of the fireplace would adversely affect the stone. I don't know whether the fireplace exterior is hot to the touch, etc.

But to have a taste of natural stone in the house seemed like a nice idea ...