The Finale to Building a Fireplace Facade: Covering the Brick, Adding Shelves, a Cabinet and Trim, Painting

This is going to be a picture heavy post, but I want to wrap everything up once and for all. Scroll to the bottom if all you care about is the "after" photos! :)

So here is where we last left off, with a bulkhead along the top (so the shelves will have something to attach to) and the top of the mantel installed.

Next it was time to install the bottom side of the mantel. And again, we used blocks of 2x4, to give us something for the underside to attach to, spaced off of the ledger board. This is because we wanted to leave a hollow space in the mantel for running our TV cables.

A Hot Tub Next to a Waterfall

Did everyone have a nice Valentine's Day + President's Day weekend?

We don't usually do much to celebrate Valentine's Day, but this year we did go on a quick cabin getaway the previous weekend, and are going to see the Book of Mormon on tour this coming weekend, so we just pretended those plans counted for Valentine's Day. :)

And speaking of the quick getaway, I wanted to share some photos, because it was a pretty amazing little spot. Mainly because of the fact that it was a cabin built next to a small waterfall, which you could see from the hot tub (hence the title of this post).

Snow Day!

Ok, not really, considering I work from home and therefore have to work everyday no matter what the weather. BUT! Snow in Raleigh is still pretty exciting, since it doesn't happen very often.

{Rewind} Building a Fireplace Facade: Installing a Mantel on a Brick Fireplace

After we built the PITA bulkhead that would support the tops of the shelves, the next step was the mantel.

Mantels are kind of tricky business. First, since it is sticking off the face of the brick so far, you have to make sure it is really well supported. And second, if you're adding one to an operational fireplace like ours, there are code restrictions that specify both how close the mantel can be to the firebox opening, and how deep the mantel can be, given it's proximity to the firebox.

To recap from my design post: In our area, the building code states that you can't have any combustible materials within 6 inches of the firebox opening. Then, at 6 inches and further away, the combustible material (wood, in our case) can only be projecting 3/4ths of an inch off the face of the fireplace, and can project further out by 1/8th of an inch for every inch you move further away from the firebox opening, until you get up to 12 inches away from the opening. This seems to be the standard guideline, according to the National Fire Protection Association, but we also verified this with our county's building inspections department.

So using that information, we determined that we could have a 10 inch deep mantel at the height we were aiming for. But since we wanted it to wrap around the sides of the brick fireplace, we needed to attach side pieces to our mantel top. We did this with some hidden pocket screws, wood glue, clamping and then sanding.

Plastic baggie between the mantel and supporting wood used to for clamping, so they wouldn't be glued together if any glue squeezed out

{Rewind} Building a Fireplace Facade: Building a Bulkhead To Intersect Beams

So, my last post about our short term kitchen update reminded me of something. I never finished posting about our fireplace facade project! I kicked off the project about a year ago, describing the design plans, and then just never got around to actually posting about how the build went.

But since we found it so useful to see other's photos and process when we were researching how to build a facade over our brick fireplace, I thought I'd do a little blog rewind and actually write this project up.

First, as a reminder, here's our full design plans post. In short, our fireplace looked like this when we moved in:

Floor to ceiling dark red brick, over 10.5 feet wide, and not a whole lot going on, other than the glass fireplace doors on the left and a deep box on the right for wood storage.

We wanted to update the fireplace, but without painting the brick, and add interest and function, without it being permanent (hey, we're planning in living in this house for a long, long time. Who knows, dark red brick might come back into style!). So we researched building codes, found some inspiration online, verified that we didn't need a permit to do the update we had in mind, and my husband put together this mock up of our design in SolidWorks.

We planned on adding a long, beefy mantel across the full width, mounting our TV above the fireplace, and building out cabinets and shelves to balance the right side of the fireplace, while adding storage for all of our TV cables and accessories.