Here’s a peek at what our fireplace looked like beforehand –
the tile was pretty ugly, the mantel was way too high, and there really wasn’t anything special about it. We started by removing all of the tile and replacing the drywall behind it.
After that, we installed our new mosaic tile. We shifted things a bit so that the tile was lined up a little better (before, it was noticeably wider on one side) and we took the tile a little higher up on the wall than it had been, and planned to move the mantel down to meet the tile.