Hesselblogger: Fireplace Mantel

Although most of the blog posts lately have been about Ryan, there is still other stuff going on in our lives believe it or not. It used to be that whenever I would tackle a house project Pamela would be following me around helping and documenting the process with lots of pictures. But now her time is much better spent taking care of our baby than taking pictures of me bent over nailing some pieces of wood together.

So here is a project I completed recently; the fireplace mantel:

Before

After

Wraps around the sides of the fireplace wall

Close-up artistic shot

Nothing terrible about the before picture but I think the addition of the mantel gives some character to that wall. It also does a nice job of concealing all the TV cables. That has been a big difference between this house and last. In the last house everything was way outdated and small changes like painting a room and hanging things on the walls made a drastic change. This house was in pretty good shape to begin with, so my projects have to be more unique and customized to really show an improvement. The mantel project wasn’t all that difficult or time consuming I just needed to set aside a few hours over a couple days and finally knock it out. I think the hardest part for me was choosing the right crown molding and trim pieces to use. My design ended up being pretty simple and only using 3 different boards all together. 1 piece of trim, 1 piece of crown, and 1 flat board for the top. I had just purchased a hammer drill for a different project so making my anchor holes was easy. Pamela helped me keep the bottom trim level as I attached the first board. Everything else went up easily and built off of that first piece. Unfortunately, I don’t have any in-progress pictures but it really did go up pretty fast. I cut out notches in the right side crown molding piece and in the back of the topper board to route the cables through. My step dad let me borrow his pin nail gun that shoots super small nails especially for trim pieces like this as well as his heavy-duty 12” miter saw. Using these tools and some careful planning there was not much finishing work to be done. I just added an extra coat of white paint and was finished. Just in time too. Later that day we broke out the Christmas decorations and Pamela had a perfect place to hang our stockings.