After a couple of weeks of work, we are finally finished with our faux fireplace. I wanted to build a fireplace with our house, but it ended up not fitting in our budget. So I put it on our home ‘glow-up’ list and started saving for it.
We had a small entertainment center on our living room wall, and envisioned having a gas log fireplace ‘built out’ of that wall. We hired Appalachian Construction to build the fireplace, cabinets, and shelf (they built everything in 2 days!). We did the painting and laid the stone ourselves. They were AMAZING and if you are local, I would highly recommend them. You can find their information here. I gave them a couple of images from Pinterest, and described what I wanted. They were a breeze to work with and were willing to try all of my crazy ideas, including using an old mantel I dug out of our barn, and using leftover scrap plywood to make our shelving and the top part of the mantel.
Prior to beginning the process, I purchased an insert for logs, and then our contractor basically built around that box. They built the cabinets with electrical outlets and also placed outlets above the mantel so we could hang our television. Then, they added shiplap around the frame to make the ‘wall’ of the fireplace.
I didn’t intend on using an old mantel, but as I was calculating costs for stone and brick, I remembered I had the back side of an old mantel that I had saved. I used the front side for the headboard of our bed. Our contractor had to trim it up a bit, but it worked perfectly.
Once our contractors were finished, I painted the fireplace and shiplap, and stained the shelving and the mantel. I also distressed the mantle afterwards using just a light-grit sanding block.
The last step was to add the stone. Because its a faux fireplace and has no support under the floor, we had to mindful of the weight. We ended up using concrete ‘stone’ from Zion Stone. I highly recommend them! They were great to work with and they have so many different colors to choose from. They are also super affordable. We were able to get all of our bottom stones AND the big top stones for under $250. Ben and I used a thin-set mortar to place the stones. Zion gave us an installation guide that we followed and it was fairly easy to do. We didn’t have a wet saw, so we just used our miter saw to make an small cuts we needed.
We are so pleased with our final product! Now that we have finished, I wanted to share a few tips that helped us along the way:
- Pin! I spent a good deal of time on Pinterest looking at different options for the face (brick, stone, wood, etc.) That also helped us plan for a budget. We set our budget at $5,000 to include EVERYTHING (logs, build, propane lines, box, etc). We came in right under budget, with just enough left to spruce up our shelving.
- Consider the weight of your faux fireplace. For us, that played a major factor in what we could use. Our fireplace isn’t supported in our basement so weight needed to be kept to a minimum.
- Purchase your fireplace insert first. Our contractor used our box to ‘build around’, as he built the rest of our structure.
- Consider how your faux fireplace can anchor your space. We had a large living room wall that swallowed our old entertainment center. Although the size of the fireplace sounded large to begin with, it actually fits the space perfectly.
- If you haven’t, consider using actual propane logs. I saw lots of fireplaces on Pinterest that had no insert (no logs) – they were simply for decoration. Our fireplace is fully functional with gas logs. They are ventless, and we have a line ran underneath the fireplace that connects to a propane tank outside. They heat our living room up quickly and are a great option for us if we lose power! We used Admiral Propane for our gas and hookup.
