Fireplace: act two

My dad visited for a week last August after the wedding. This is now an annual event (his visit, not the wedding), and we spent this year’s visit building and installing our new fireplace. I found a picture of the fireplace I wanted in an issue of Fine Homebuilding, and we started by creating a scaled drawing from the basic photo in the article. All said and done, it was a productive week: we milled lumber for the mantel out of some old fir posts I had left over from the basement demo, we demo’ed and prep’ed a section of the living room, we ordered, picked-up, and installed the fireplace unit (and ran gas for it), and we built 90% of the mantel itself. When dad left, we had a working fireplace, sans the mantel top.

And that’s how it has sat for the last 5 months. Until last weekend when I decided enough was enough, so I went to Second Use and bought a big fir plank that will become the mantel top.

The plank was long enough (15 feet) to be twice the length we needed for the top. So I cut it in half and set it on the mantel, and now we have yet another hoizontal surface to collect piles of crap. Fortunately, that hasn’t happened yet.

Today I decided it would be a good idea to continue this momentum, so I spent a few hours in the shop constructing some trim work that fits between the mantel and its top. As I write this it’s all gluing up down stairs. If all goes well, I bet we could have a completed mantel by the end of February!