We’ve taken a breather on the home projects these past few months between my pregnancy and losing my dad, but something exciting we did manage to sneak in was finally selecting a stone for our fireplace hearth!
We were on the hunt for months and truly had no idea which direction we wanted to go in color-wise. We know that long term we are envisioning some sort of vintage stone or marble carved mantel, but we are open to that being creamy or dark, and haven’t found it yet. Obviously we were leaning to a neutral hearth of some sort, but I was open to a lot within that and wasn’t sure if I wanted to go light or dark with it either. Our inspirations, some shown below, were all over the place, light mantel, dark hearth, vice versa, sometimes both. You can’t seem to go wrong. So it came down to finding something that really spoke to us.
Marble Slab Shopping Tip
It had become somewhat of a weekly ritual to go stone slab shopping, but we were limited in a few ways. One, the piece we needed for the hearth wasn’t that big, certainly not an entire slab’s worth. Two, we didn’t want to spend a ton of money. Enter: remnants. Remnants are leftover marble pieces from larger jobs. IE- someone did their kitchen, but didn’t need half the slab they purchased and didn’t want to keep it, so it winds up back at the yard as a remnant. Not every stone yard offers remnants, but when they do they are a fraction of the cost of a full slab! Usually hundreds vs thousands of dollars, to give you an idea.
We found our beauty at Renovva Stone in Thousand Oaks. Immediately when we walked in we inquired about remnants, and our stone savior Anton brought us through the warehouse and into their incredibly organized back lot with a TON of remnants! Way more options than we had seen at other stone yards in the area. Anton was super helpful with helping us find what we needed in terms of color, type of stone (had to be marble or another hard stone because it is going near heat – ie no quartz) and even finding a cut that was pretty much the perfect size we were looking for! It was love at first sight when we saw this black, cream & brown beauty. Mark and I both gasped and knew it was the one.
It feels like a piece of art and we had to have it. The rest of the process was super easy. Renovva Stone came out with a high-tech laser thing to work out the exact dimensions we needed. Then, the Renovva installers came out, cut and beveled the piece on-site right in our driveway. In literally less than an hour we had our new hearth!
Here she is in all her glory. It looks a little unfinished since we still need a mantle and fireplace interior, but it has already added so much interest and dimension to our living room and I can’t wait to watch it evolve as we add in the other pieces! I have questioned the roman clay color with the hearth… it all of a sudden pulls more green toned than tan now that we’ve added the marble, so I may redo the color wash on it at some point. But want to see how it looks with whatever mantle we decide on first. What do you think?
Xx,
This post was in collaboration with Renovva Stone. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
