Well, everything gets dirty in different ways over time. It seems to me that something more porous would absorb the usual house stuff in the air and need to be cleaned. Now maybe I'm basing this on older houses that didn't have the ventilation systems we have now, where more people were living in smaller spaces, where dust and dirt settled on the brick face of fireplaces, etc. Careless guests also come to mind, where they bump a tray and something (meat, cheese, something with grease) goes flying off, a kid grabs his plate of spaghetti and it flips upside down and splatters all over, or someone bumps into a person and his drink goes splashing up on the ceiling. These things have happened to me, and I have relatively sedate gatherings! I just have no experience with slate or honed marble, and since light colors can show some dirt/stains, I thought I'd ask to see what experiences others might have had with them. Anne

I use a photo editing program (MS Digital Imaging Suite, which is discontinued :( I capture images from the net with ScreenPrint Platinum and then cut and paste materials into the photo. It's pretty much cut & paste, although I have taken to a lot of the other tools to work with color and blending, etc. Someone recently posted a free photo editing program ... You can either superimpose (paste) or also cut the stone out of your original picture and place the new material behind in the blank space, which might be an easy way for you to go. Usually the net images are too bright, so tone down the color a bit using the saturation and lightness/darkness features in the coloring tools. Feathering the edges with the blur tool is another good tip. I would say it seems you have enough detail with the grill and mantel, so it's hard to imagine putting pebbles in, which does seem off in style as well with the mantel. Not that we need any rules :) I do think they look very pretty together with a simple, plain surround, though. I only tried the soapstone, low contrast, which I find keeps it very simple to let the details of the mantel and grill shine. Everything shouldn't be calling for attention or it will get too busy and confusing to look at. I'm sure you know what I mean :) Such beautiful pieces!

Hi. The fireplace tech (different than the first tech) came today and determined that the damper wasn't open enough. The first tech put in a damper clip to keep it open. Apparently I didn't understand, or he didn't explicitly tell me, that I needed to open the damper all the way, by hand, every time I wanted to use the fireplace which is nightly. This is the first time we've had this type of fireplace; our previous fireplaces were enclosed gas fireplaces with a switch. I'm not versed on fireplaces and never grew up with them; I'm a little irritated that my husband didn't think about checking it out as he grew up with fireplaces in Pennsylvania. This is a gas fireplace that I just found out was originally a wood burning fireplace but they decided to screw around with a pan and put in ceramic logs, not to mention that it's hard lined gas and not flexible lined gas. As for cleaning the mantle, he recommended Meeco's Red Devil which can only be bought online such as Amazon. So they won't pay to repaint the three walls and ceiling that were sooted up. I just painted these walls, too. I hate homeownership.

I think brick + marble is such a good classic look. What is the style of your house? If you do brick and decide you don't like it, you could always paint it black. But as far as I know, you can't put a brick facade over a black liner. We just updated our 1980s fireplace and I wanted brick, but we had to stick with black. The fireplace store said you can't just pull out an old insert and put in a new one; it requires redoing the whole fireplace/chimney. So no pressure, but your choice is pretty permanent! :) Here they did herringbone marble tile and straight brick. It would also look great reversed -- herringbone brick and straight marble.