Thursday, July 23, 2015

In lieu of throwback Thursday, I thought I'd talk about our fireplace, built by my amazing, "handy-man" of a fiance and may I add, a total hunk. He started building this huge piece in the beginning of May. He worked on it almost every weekend, . A lot of early mornings and late nights, hot and sunny days leading to sunburns, working in the rain, muddy boots and Mike being shirtless - I, for one, did not mind this at all.


 Here are a few pictures, from beginning to end, that I took over the past couple of months.

 Our yard in early May. So bare and a lot of dry dirt. Our yard now is the total opposite from this. The trees have sprouted leaves and we have a forest of weeds. The weeds are never ending!
 

 There was a point where he was darker than me... or more red. I'll let you decide.

 I'm the luckiest girl. He really does try his hardest to give me everything I ask for. When we talked about what we wanted to do with the backyard, he was dead set on building a fireplace. I then brought up the idea of building a pizza oven with the fireplace. I asked, and he said he would try. He was a bit discouraged because he had never built a pizza oven before, let alone on top of a fireplace, but, like always, he found a way and built one.

 Once all the blocks were laid, we thought that the hard part was done. We were definitely wrong about that. Those stone caps were SO heavy, even cutting them into somewhat smaller pieces for him to work with, they still weighed more than 200 lbs. He really is my Superman. I watched him, try to figure out how he was going to carry these heavy stone caps up to the top and then actually doing it. It definitely gave me a mini heart attack, worrying he'd fall. I don't know how, but he managed to lay all the caps and not breaking anything. Cheers to that!

Last but not least, the stone work. This is the same stone that covers the front of our house. Mike picked the stone and I'm so happy he did. There is a crew of guys that subcontracts for Mike, ITS Masonry. They are awesome. He had them do the stonework on the fireplace and it turned out amazing. 


 And now that the fireplace is all done, that's one thing out of our long list of "to-do's" for the backyard, that we can check off the list. And something Mike can most definitely be proud of.