7QT: Trompe L’Oeil Fireplace Project

My husband and I have been in Upstate NY since late June.  Four of our boys and their families came up here for a week in early July, but otherwise we haven't been with our gang--and I miss them.  On Sunday, we're heading down to VA to check on our house there, and to break up the long summer and see our kids and grandkids.  All five boys and their families will be there, and I'm extremely excited to reconnect with everyone.   

So I thought it was apropos to do a post about our VA house.

A little over a year ago, just after we’d just finished off our VA basement, we got a discarded wooden fireplace mantle from son #3 and his wife.  (A neighbor of theirs had done a renovation and was giving it away for free, and our kids liked it but didn’t have a place to use it in their new house.)  I love a good trompe l'oeil treatment about as much as anyone, so I decided to take that mantle and create a faux fireplace with a blazing fire in it.  Actually, this was something we had considered doing in the basement of our old house in NH, but we never got around to it.  

I  thought I’d post the step-by-step transformation of this mantle project here at the blog.  (I did this a while ago in an Instagram story—back before I deleted my account—so you might have seen it already.) 

TAKE 1

First step: paint in the gray "mortar" that will go behind the bricks.  (I’m sorry.  The first step was really “get husband to expertly mount mantle to wall.”  I forgot that part!  But as you can see from the first photo up there, he did a great job!)

TAKE 2

Add the bricks—using a template made by tracing the bricks on the side of our house!

TAKE 3

Start giving the interior a three-dimensional look

TAKE 4

Create white brick interior.  (Lots of measuring, and using a level!)

TAKE 5

Make an andiron pattern to trace; sketch in and paint two of them.

TAKE 6

Blacken parts of the interior bricks to look “sooty”; add logs in the grate.

TAKE 7

Now make it burn, baby, burn!  (Sorry, that’s a disco-era reference from the 70’s that young whippersnappers won’t even get, and now you know how old I am.)  I kind of wanted to leave it with the logs unlit (you know, so the grandkids would be safe playing near it—ha ha!).  But my husband definitely wanted a fire.

By this point, I was pretty happy with my faux fireplace, and it was essentially finished.   But the flames needed tweaking—they were a bit dull-looking.  So I added some color to enliven them, as well as some more details (such as red-hot embers underneath).

And there you have it: a fireplace safe for our grandchildren’s playroom.  It fills in an empty wall nicely and “warms up" the space considerably!

 

I had originally thought I would distress the bricks a bit, to make them look old, instead of keeping them this dark red.  But I liked the way it looked and decided to leave well enough alone.  (My middle son humorously suggested that maybe I should touch the bricks up a little bit every year that we live here, so they’ll "age" along with the house!  We shall see...)

For now, as far as this “fool the eye” project goes, c'est finis!  Now allez vous, head on over to Kelly's for more 7QT fun.