The Manly Mantle is Basically Done

When we purchased our home it came fully equipped with this mantle (and 70’s mirror).

(That I was perfectly content with and Joel thought was wimpy…)

One Saturday when I came home from lunch with a friend, I found THIS in my kitchen…

Which made me run into the living room to find this deviously smiling fellow…

I told him he was so handy and thrifty that he could do whatever he wanted, but it HAD to be done in time for a baby shower only a few days later…

Sidenote: Does anyone else ever try to clean up the sawdust only to find another project underway and more dust on the way?

The worker bee got this far in time for the shower…

Good enough. He’s so good at this stuff, I can’t really complain. But…I am HAPPY to announce that it now looks like…THIS!

Any pointers on hiding the DVD player?? Joel has a big plan…but I don’t know if it will actually happen.

And for my birthday it looked like THIS!

He says he’s still going to build a cabinet to hide the TV behind my gold mirror and have it on hydraulics, etc…but we shall see :)