Wow! That looks fabulous!

The guys doing the fireplace are Portuguese, and they are still upset about how Portugal was robbed at the World Cup!

Here, one guy is buttering the back of the brick and installing it. The other guy is cutting them as fast as guy #1 can mark them.

UPDATE: the guy in the photo here is Joe, and his son is "the other guy".
This is the armour wall. You saw it on page 14 or 15, I think. The black stuff is some excess landscape fabric.

Update: Huh - what does that mean: "You saw it on page 14 or 15, I think"??? I obviously wrote that when I was tired. :^))

You can see what the armour wall looks like from the porch on the July 25th blog entry.

This is the finished fireplace.

All we can say is "Wow!"

Joe and his son are coming back tomorrow to redo / repair the parging.