When we first moved into our Concord home, Jeanine and I both disliked the casual brick hearth and surround decorating our living room fireplace. This morning I started a renovation project and made good progress between outings to buy materials, and shuttling Maya to her soccer game, guitar lesson, and a birthday party. My first task was to correct an installation error on the flue. Indoor air was able to flow freely around the closed flue because a large gap had not been filled. I built a frame from wood and poured in a batch of concrete which did the trick nicely. Next I removed the top course of bricks from the fireplace arch since they stood proud of the face by about an inch. Finally I used thinset to adhere cement backing board to the facade and hearth covering the existing brick. This will provide a nice flat surface to which the new stone will be applied. A sample tile of the marble is shown in the lower left corner of the after photo. I plan to complete the stone work over the next few weeks.