faux fireplace in time for the holdiays!

Building a faux fireplace for an all electric house.

linked up! 

There is still so much we want to do to our new house.. adding some old home charm is one of the things we are trying to accomplish.

We had talked about building a faux fire place since our house is all electric. We plan to eventually instal a Dimplex electric firebox.. they can be pretty costly so maybe next year.. for now our little fake log set will have to do. Even though its a little cheesy there is still something kind of fun about it.

I cant wait to get a color on the wall, trim out the baseboards and doors. Im beginning to hate our living room just a little less with the addition of the fireplace. We plan to eventually build some small built in book shelves next to the fireplace on either side. Adam would like to mount the tv above the fireplace with a built in look. However due to the way the ac is located on the ceiling not sure we can run the wires.

so onto how we did it..

I started off with a design I did in sketchup... found here.. Fireplace plans WARNING there are some things wrong on this and we made some changes.. Im going to try to update that post in a little later but it can give you an idea of how we went from boring wall to fun new fireplace.

First things first I need to brag on a product.. no I didn't get paid for this.. although if Kreg wants to sponsor me Id gladly mention the name 10 or so more times in this post :)

IF you dont have one buy one.. that is all... 

We started by building the hearth box.. we used 2x2. They were 64 inch long. The verticals were 6, and the width supports were 12.5 I believe.. WE Kreg jigged it all together..

I also suggest getting some of their clamps and right angle clamp is great!

assembled hearth box..

Next we covered the box on the sides with mdf.. I think we ended up using 2 4x8 sheets for this project.. although we did have some 4 inch strips that were left over from our baseboards that I used for some of the trimmings.. The top was two 1x10 kreg jigged together.. we did cut one board down a little so that it over hung about an inch and a half from the front edge of the hearth.. but was flush on the side since we plan to build the book shelves.. I stained it with Rust-oleum's ultimate wood stain in ebony. It claims it only needs one coat and no wood conditioner.. we were using it on cheap pine and while it did pretty good it was still blotchy... normal with pine.. so I just sanded a little and added a second coat..

Next we started working on the legs and header.. to do this we cut our facings out of the mdf and kreg jigged them to 1x3s. We screwed the 1x3s to the wall.. make sure its level and square.. and do this before adding the front parts :).

painted before adding the trim to make it easier to paint

We changed up the plans a little and decided to add crown molding for the mantel part.. instead of doing a square stained box.

Prob can't see it in the photos but we did a bead board cut on a 45 to make it look like herringbone.. that was a tough one.. 

So here it all is put together and decored for Christmas.. Im so glad we went ahead and got it done for the holidays.. I apologize for the lack of step by step photos we had and super cold front coming through and we were rushing to get it done before the cold hit.. 

paper mache deer makes a comeback sporting one of my scarfs :) and found the cute little  deer at target

Love this little vintage snowman my mom bought him for me he plugs in and lights up.. peak at the herringbone bead board..

My fav... House of Hatten.. I love these my mom had these when we were little I finally ordered me some this year that I found on ebay.. too bad they are hard to find and pretty expensive now.. Should have got my camera out for this sorry for all the phone pics..