We have a large fireplace in our family room, which is the closest room to the back yard.  In the back yard, and what is now the centerpalce of our pool house (when we eventually put in a pool) is a large 100+ year old fireplace.  It seemed natural to use some stone on the inside fireplace in homage to the other one outdoors, and originally we wanted to veneer the entire thing with stone.

But as we got closer to the end of the project, we realized that that cost was simply not in our budget.  We cnsidered a simpler option, to just have a stone mantle and hearth, but that too seemed more expensive than we wanted.

We looked at a number of other options, like using tile, or a wood mantle, but none of them seemed particularly well suited to this fireplace, which brought us back to the stone option.

One particular challenge of this fireplace is the already high mantle height.  Because the fireplace is designed to have two tiers, the top part being small in both the X and Y dimension, the forced height of the area above the fire box made for a very high mantle.  Stacking 8 inches of stone on top of that would have seemed far too high.

Here is the fireplace before any finishing.

On the floor, we had a similar challenge.  Our flooring is 3/4″ thick, which is a nearly impossible thickness to cut sandstone to, without making it too brittle.

For the mantle, we decided to do a 3D veneer that wraps down the front.  Here are some of the pieces before installation.

That first piece wraps perfectly around the corner!

For the hearth, we cut out the sub-floor and put in some thinner plywood, gaining some room.  Then, they beveled the edge of the pieces to give us an additional 3/8″ and still meet the flooring.  Here they are before installation.

Here is the end result.