DIY Faux Fireplace

Another fun and beautiful DIY that we created in the past was our faux fireplace. It all started when I found an antique fireplace surround that I instantly fell in love with, but when I looked at the price tag and saw it was $450, I knew i'd have to make do with a more affordable alternative.

This project cost us $50 total. We used mostly extra pieces of lumber we had in the garage from other projects, and just bought a few minor things to bring it all together.

Supplies

• 4 1x10x8ft Pine boards

• 6 1x4x6ft MDF white primed boards

• 2 1x8x6ft Pine boards

• 1 1x12x6ft Pine board

• 2 Wooden Corbels or brackets

• Wooden applique

• Nail Gun

• Spray Gorilla Adhesive

• Paint and Stain

We wanted to add a faux fireplace to the master bedroom to add that cozy feel! There are many ways we could have built it, but ultimately we opted to mount it to the wall. You absolutely don't have to do this. You can adjust our plans to make your own mobile faux fireplace if that is what you would prefer.

The first step was to figure out the placement of the fireplace, then remove the section of baseboard where it's going to be mounted. My husband used a dremel and crowbar to do this. At this point, I was a little nervous to do something so permanent, but sometimes you just have to go with your gut, and mine said to do it!

Next we used the 1x4 MDF boards to create the frame. The width of the fireplace is 4 feet long and 4 and a half feet tall, but you can adjust yours to fit your space.

After the framing was done, we used the 1x10 pine boards to build the fireplace surround and mantle. For the inside of the fireplace, we had lots of different options in mind, but went with a simpler look and chose weathered shiplap. To achieve this, we used 1x4 pine wood boards and tile spacers between the boards to imitate a shiplap pattern.

After we screwed the corbels on, we then used some spray gorilla adhesive to glue the applique to the center of the fireplace surround.

The last steps were to stain and paint! I used my Varathane premium stain in Early American because I had quite a bit of this on hand. I did one quick coat, and was mostly concerned with the edges. For this project, I used a white chalk paint because I wanted a matte finish on the fireplace. I also wanted to make it look somewhat aged and distressed, so after I painted 3 coats of white, I sanded down around some of the edges and corners a little so the stain would show through. Since I wanted the shiplap to look weathered as well, I used three different Varathane premium stains; Early american, Briarsmoke, and Weathered grey. There was no particular pattern here. There were some boards with one stain color, and some with mixed stains. This took me about 5 minutes to do and they turned out great!