Only annoying because I hadn't expected to find the original hearth under the carpet - they've been ripped out in every other room. Anyway, it's got lovely dark green tiles, flush to the original pine floorboards. So what would you do about the surrounding floor?
The floorboards are really too knackered to restore - the house was bedsits in a previous life and the boards have been cut for heating/wiring a lot, replaced and mismatched, and covered with lino in places.
We were planning engineered wood with lots of insulation from the cellar below, but then we'd end up with a weird sort of sunken hearth.
At some point in the next year or so we plan to open up the (currently bricked-up) chimney breast and stick a wood burning stove in there. I guess the existing hearth might not meet fire regs anyway.
Do I just stick engineered wood over the top of the lovely tiles, with a view to sticking a new raised hearth on top again in the near future? Or is there any way of salvaging them to re-lay flush with the new floor?