I awoke one morning to find that my wife breaking the tile off the front of our fireplace. Granted, a gray bathroom-tiled fireplace wasn't my idea of beauty, but I knew exactly what this was going to mean: about a week of my time working on a project that I wasn't expecting and didn't ask for.
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| I did not ask for this. |
My wife explained that the gray tile was ugly, and so her plan was to expose the brick beneath the tile and paint it white. Furthermore, the fireplace didn't even work - the last two times we tried to light a fire, we ended up with a house full of smoke - so she wanted to put a bookshelf in the firebox.
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| Don't need this anymore! |
I suppose that I could have said "No, thank you!", but my wife's "Pinspiration" looked much better than our current fireplace, and I figured that putting in a week's work for a good-looking fireplace was probably better than declining to help and ending up with a half-brick, half-tile, permanently-unfinished fireplace as the center piece our living room.
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| Check out that tiny 1" molding! |
I assigned my wife the job of removing all of the tile and chiseling off all of the old grout. I took on the task of designing and building the bookshelf. This is about the time that I discovered that wood prices are VERY HIGH right now. Hardwood was out of the question, so I decided to build the bookshelf out of 3/4" Birch Plywood. It's sturdy, and looks great when sanded and painted. I needed one sheet of 4' x 8' plywood, but unfortunately, Home Depot was sold out and I had to buy four 2' x 4' sheets at double the price of a single sheet of big plywood. Boo!
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| Nice scrapin'! |
I also used a 2x4 stud to build a rough frame around the outside-front of the bookshelf. This was to help the bookshelf fit snugly inside the firebox, give me something to attach molding to, and to help hide the flu pull-chain. Since our firebox is narrower toward the back, this also allowed me to build a rectangular bookshelf instead of a weird trapezoidal shape, which would have been more difficult for me.
One thing that you probably noticed about our fireplace is that we have 4 strange vent holes. Our initial idea was to basically cover up these holes with some fancy 8" x 8" tiles (one per hole), but after building the bookshelf, I realized that I had enough scrap wood to make little cubby holes in the vents.
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| Ready for some shelves |
It's hard to tell from the pictures, but our original mantelboard was very wimpy. It was only 3/4" thick, and just looked chintzy. I tried a few things to make it look a little better, but in the end, I decided that I just needed to buy a new mantelboard. Hardwood was out of the question (due to the price), so I opted for a 2x12 piece of Douglas Fir.
After that, there was a lot of sanding, molding, caulking, priming, and painting. It did indeed take me (and my wife, the Scraping Queen!) the better part of a week to complete the project, but I have to admit that the fireplace looks MUCH better than it did before. Plus, it is considerably more functional! Instead of a pile of kids' books on the hearth, we can not put them neatly on the bookshelf, giving us additional floor space. Hooray!
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| All done! |
Total Time: ~ 1 week
Total Cost: ~$200
Total Difficulty: Med-high
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