DIY Faux Fireplace

Our room is let’s just say cozy, it was the smaller of the bedrooms in our home but the one that came with both an ensuite bath and walk in closet so we chose it as our main bedroom. I am often looking for ways to add a little interest to our room but with limited space that is often hard to do. So enter this little wall mounted DIY fireplace. It was the perfect addition, took up minimal floor space, helped anchour our wall mounted TV and brought a new level of cozy to our space. Below I’ll take you along on the process, what we used and how we created our little wood filled fireplace!

It all started with this shelf I had and we built from there, I loved that the shelf had the small drawers {which fit our remotes perfectly} and the beaded detail was a great way to bring more layers to the piece.

We then built out the sides, front and base, before choosing trim/mouldings I like to have the main area complete and then decide from there as sometimes less is more. I ended up going with a combo of simple moulding and some with more detail to bring a little texture to the finished piece. Once everything was built, it all got a coat of paint, I then like to go back and dry brush the entire piece making all the little detail pieces pop and bringing that distressed look that I love. For the dry brushing I used an inexpensive brown acrylic craft paint which completely did the trick.

Once I had finished painting the fireplace surround and dry brushing it, I added a coat of clear wax to seal it all. Then we cut and painted a piece of backboard black to fill in the opening, we did this so when the logs were added it would just look like blank space in between them.

You could simply leave your surround open, or add candles, for us because we had limited space and our fireplace wasn’t deep the log pieces were a great choice. We cut the logs at the same thickness but used many different sizes to give a more organic look, like the logs had been stacked and fell into place. Once we had all the logs cut, we laid the fireplace on it back and went to work fitting in all the pieces. With all the wood rounds in place I lifted out and glued each one individually using wood glue. {I think this step is important so you don’t end up with a bunch of small or large pieces in one area if you were to glue as you go, laying it out made for a more cohesive look} I then added a piece of painters tape to the logs which had been glued just to mark it, with so many pieces I found it was getting hard to remember which ones were stuck and which ones were not.

We chose to remove the baseboard and cut it to length either side of fireplace so when we anchoured the fireplace it was flush at top and bottom. The drawers came in handy here as we removed then to then drill right through the back and into a stud to anchour it to the wall. Once the fireplace was installed I chose to go back over it with some white wax as I wanted the overall piece to be a bit more muted, and waiting till it was in place allowed me to see how much I wanted to add in the daylight of the room.

Listed are all the supplies used:

• 1/2 inch MDF
• 1×6 Pine
• 2 kinds of wood trim
• pre-made shelf
• Chalk Paint
• Acrylic craft paint
• birch logs in various sizes
• wood wax
• wood glue
• brad nails
• screws for anchoring

I love how it turned out, it adds another layer of coziness to our room, and a great focal point when we are curled up in bed watching a show! If you have an questions about this little DIY, drop me a line and I would be happy to answer them for you!!