Jason's Wall of Fame

I don't especially know why, but Jason likes to refer to our newly completed fireplace and built-in bookshelf addition, as the Wall of Fame. There aren't any artifacts of anyone famous on the wall, but he's pretty proud of it, so I guess that's where the title comes from. And, I'm proud enough of him, to roll with this name, and not roll my eyes when he sits on the couch at the end of the day, lets out a sigh and says, "Ahh, the wall of fame."

When we moved in













Before starting this project













After











This project has totally transformed this room. I should mention that this part of the house is what we call the "new" part. It's about 35 years old, but compared to the rest of our homes 95, she's a spring chicken. When we moved in, this "new" part really didn't have the architectural details that the rest of the home did; I think this project has really changed that. My favorite part is that when we bought this house a year and a half ago, we looked at the wall, then a row of closets and an odd built in ironing board, and said, "If we knocked out all of these closets, pushed back all of the walls, turned this weird ugly full bathroom into a powder room, added a fireplace and built a wall of built in bookshelves; we could use this room as a family room." It has been fun to watch it transform, and it's great to see it come to life and be done. Of course we did all of the work ourselves, aside from the actual installation of the fireplace. For that, we paid the fireplace store- not because Jason couldn't have physically have done it, but because it took the fireplace store two guys and four hours and I know I won't have a gas leak or a house fire. Jason completely built the bookshelves and the mantle from scratch, piece by piece. There have been a lot of nights of just sitting on the couch staring and admiring. :)

Here are some pictures of the month or so of construction as we made progress: