Fireplace Mantel

When we bought the house, one of the first things we said we wanted to do was add a mantel around the fireplace. The room just looked so bland and blah without it, besides, where are we going to hang the stocking come Christmas time.

There is nothing MC loves more than decorating for Christmas, so I knew I had a deadline to find and install a mantel. I started looking on craigslist to see if I could find a mantel with some not so ordinary measurements. After weeks of searching I thought I would have to bite the bullet and shell out at least $200 for a new mantel and hope that it would fit. At just about that time, I found an ad on craigslist that was trying to get rid of their mantel for a whopping $25. Yeah, twenty-five. At first I thought this was a typo since everyone else was selling it for at least $125, so I responded to the ad and sure enough, it was only $25. I got my excitement in check  almost knowing that this was too good to be true, it seems to be the right size but what if I measured wrong. At worst, I’d be out $25, which I was willing to accept. I drove over and picked up the mantel, it fit to the inch into my Element (a sign, I thought), and brought it home. The couple I picked it up from were awesome, they were building a new mantel and just wanted to get rid of this…and they had a dog named Yoda, so again…a sign. It needed a new coat of paint, and nails to be removed, but I was amazed to find out it fit PERFECTLY.

Last weekend, I finally went to town cutting off the slanted and banged up bottoms (which I had to cut twice due to a wrong measurement) and MC and I put a fresh new coat of our favorite “polar bear” white Behr paint. Once it was dry, I took a few finish nails and got that sucker onto the wall.

There was one SLIGHT problem I didn’t expect though, and that was a small gap between the wall and the mantel. Why didn’t I notice this before, its because I had to sand that area down due to some caulk that was on there before, and well, I over sanded.

So I took some foam filler and sprayed it in the crack to seal up that gap. Once the filler had dried I did a fresh coat of caulk around the whole mantel to seal it up nicely.There was also one other SLIGHT problem. The firebox slate wasn’t flush to the mantel. My father in law called this the reveal, and so I assumed it wasn’t flush so that you could put some tile on the slate to jazz it up and make it flush. Well, I’m more rock n’ roll than jazz, so I took it upon myself to find a new solution. I took the same trim I used in the kitchen and used it on the underside of the mantel. Now everything is flush, sealed, and just about done. I need to paint the areas of the trim that I had to nail, but aside from that, it’s done. I’ll admit, it’s not 100% perfect, but unless you look really hard, you won’t notice the slight imperfections. Besides, it was $25, and it’s awesome.