My son and I are moving ahead on the basement project. My nephew comes tomorrow to wire for the surround sound and the projector. My neighbors redesigned their basement and we got the 100 inch screen. Yep, we're going to watch the superbowl - supersized. Doing alot of the work ourselves allows the guys to spend money on the important stuff.

We found some cool electric fireplaces at Lowe's. Since the basement has lower ceilings we needed something smaller to be in scale with the rest of the space. Unfortunately the smaller fireplace surrounds were the wrong color of stain. The one we liked was too dark, almost black, I think they call it Espresso. So we bought the fireplace insert and decided to build the surround ourselves. This is the unstained result:

{{gwi:137207}}

We bought some other trims including something that would look like an upright column, but decided that we like it as it is. This thing has a remote control! You can turn on either just the "logs and the fire" or turn on the heating elements too. It puts out alot of heat, I'm very surprised.

This success has emboldened me to think that perhaps we can build a windowseat for the library.