Building Our Fireplace: The DIY Mantel – Our DIY House

One of my most favourite features in Our DIY House is our fireplace. It’s THISCLOSE to being done – I’m waiting on the cleaning fairy to sprinkle me with motivational fairy dust so that I can clean the slate surround and seal it. We’ve already had our first fire in it and it was glorious. I’ll share the final picture of it soon (this will be my official motivator to get it done), but meanwhile I’ll share with you the process of building our DIY “rustic glam” fireplace.

At first, I wasn’t sure about this whole “wood burning fireplace” thing. It was my hubby’s choice to splurge a little a lot on one, and I wasn’t convince that it was the right choice. Well, I am now! It adds such a beautiful feature to our home as you walk in the front door. It’s warm, cozy and inviting.

Hubby’s more of a rustic guy and I consider myself somewhat of a glamourous girl (on the inside, anyhow), so we each added a little of our own taste to the fireplace design. I wanted a thick, white mantel and he wanted rustic slate surround. I wasn’t sure about the combo at the beginning, but I’m totally in love with the contrast now. My inspiration was this gorgeous fireplace in this Sarah Richardson designed living room. I liked the sort of coastal feel it had.

If I’ve never said how wonderfully talented my mom is, I’ll say it now: my mom is talented. She saw my vision and she told me right away that her and Dad could make my vision into a reality with less than $70 worth of wood & MDF (no joke!) and a TON of their hard work.

First, we mounted a piece of MDF (about 1″ thick by 12″ high) onto our fireplace (that was wrapped in cement board) for the back of the mantel. We checked into the requirements of how far away from the firebox our mantel had to be and used that as a guide for placement. We wrapped this piece around the sides as well.

Next we screwed on a piece of 1 x 3″ lumber to the front top edge.

We screwed on another piece of 1 x 3″ to that and mounted a slim piece of 1 x 4″ beneath it as pictured above.

For the actual mantel piece, my parents laminated two thin pieces of MDF together to make a thick piece, and then they notched out the shape of the fireplace so that the mantel would wrap around it. This was screwed to the top of the wood pieces.

My parents made the beautiful little corbels by laminating 4 pieces of thin MDF together and cutting out the shape with a jigsaw. They were sanded to perfection, primed with Killz and painted so that the seams are totally invisible!

A thin strip of MDF was mounted to the bottom of the main piece. We made sure it was wide enough to jut out from the slate we were installing around the mantel.

Here, you can see the crown molding we added to the front (from the mantel piece to the piece on top of the corbels) and a cross-section of the pieces we used to create the mantel.

The entire thing was then primed with Killz, and painted with 4 coats of white semi-gloss paint (Valspar Ultra White).

The result is one of the most substantial and gorgeous looking mantels I’ve laid eyes upon in real life. Can you believe it cost less that $70 to make (but many, many hours of work)?

Later, I’ll share with your our rustic glam fireplace reveal and how we installed our pretty slate tile to complete our look.

Thanks Mom, Dad & Hubby for all of your hard work on this gorgeous, heirloom mantel!