Curvy Fireplace: part I

So, background on what prompted the drill drooling in the first place.

I was working on helping a friend build a fireplace surround, and neither of our cordless drills were having the torque needed to drive some 2x4s together very well.  So he went and checked with another mutual friend (his across the street neighbor), who responded with a "I have just the tool for the job".

Enter the cute little cordless impact drill.

Swoon.

And I fell in love and the rest is history, history that can be read here.

But I thought that I would show some work-in-progress photos on the fireplace and then maybe update with done photos when done.

It's curvy.  Not anything that I would ever think up on my own (my style runs a little more traditional), but once presented was a design challenge that I wanted to take on.

Here's the mock up that I drew in Google SketchUp (love that program) before we began to make sure we were on the same page as far as what the end product would look like.  It also turned out to be very very useful in that I could extract measurements for the curves directly from the program without having to do lots of math.

Nothing against math, I like it, but this was easy and probably prevented mess ups.

The final product will vary depending on the tile they choose, but I'm pretty pleased with how it's turning out.