A holiday project...

 

Living in rented accommodation we do our best to make it homely but one thing we both miss is an open fire. Now there is obviously no way to fix that at this time but J being the creative genius that he is sent the picture below to his sister and tagged it "operation fireplace" unbeknownst to me.

 

I came home from grocery shopping to find him knee deep in Styrofoam boards plotting.

Obviously at this stage he had to spill the beans...

 

 

He wanted to make a fireplace, to enclose the television on which we could put the fireplace channel from YouTube. So clever!! 

 

 

He started by boxing in the base and sides, leaving a gap at the back to avoid overheating of course.

I added my two cents and had him make the top higher and to step out the imaginary bricks. He used no more nails for the adhesive and a few screws to keep things in place while it dried.

 

 

Once the adhesive had dried, he filled in the screw holes and any little gaps. Then set about marking out the "bricks", used his dremel to create the mortar gaps and roughen up board to give the "brick" some texture as you can see below.

 

 

 

 

Once the detailing was finished he primed the whole piece twice and allowed to dry over night. The following morning he was up nice and early giving it a top coat. The paint he got as returns that  Canadian Tire where selling off but the color worked out perfectly. Using a lint free mini roller he painted out the bricks, leaving the mortar spaces the base color. 

 

After two coats she looked like this......



 

 He went on to add some light touches of black paint along the base and on the inside bricks to give a smoky illusion. Once dry she was given pride of place and we lit the fire.....

 

 

 

Here she is in all her Christmas glory. I cannot tell you much I love this. It adds such a homely feel to our relatively bland apartment. I'm not sure I could allow him get rid of it after Christmas ;-)

 

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Michelle xxx