Painting turned into Remodeling

How are all my friends today? I hope this finds you well, warm, and happy.
I wrote this post Thanksgiving weekend and have been trying to upload pictures since then. Blogger has been a HUGE pain!!

I finally saved my pictures to photobucket.com and then copy and pasted to the blog post..!!

Anyways, this is what we have been up to.
 

I knew we had a long weekend so I talked my wonderful, sweet husband into painting the living room. It hasn't been done since we moved in 8 years ago! It was way over due!

 

Now our house is about 150 years old and you never know what you will find. Keep that in mind....

 

The living room is covered in ugly 80's dark paneling that we painted white immediately after moving in. We had a pretty good inclination that there was cool, old, red brick above the fireplace behind the paneling. So since everything we do around here turns into this HUGE ordeal or actually a huge mess, we went from painting to tearing off the paneling above the fireplace.

 

Now when we (I use the term "we" very loosely) tore off the paneling we found plaster! Great, plaster!! Of course this will not be simple. So "we" chipped off the plaster. Cool brick!! Yeah!!

 
We found a little cubby behind there that they had covered up at some time.

Wait there's more.

 

Around the fireplace opening is the ugly yellow-orange 70's brick and a very narrow, concrete mantel that we both hate but I was just going to paint the brick! Oh no. That would not be sufficient. "We" are already this far we might as well tear it all off!!!

 

Yep. So "we" did! We found that when they had put in the stove insert they tore out the lentil and some of the brick so there was a gaping hole above the stove. It's a wonder that the brick hadn't fallen even worse.

 

Stay tuned.....tomoorow morw before and even some after pictures!!