There is many different ways that you can create a beautiful electric fireplace; stacked stone, brick, pre-made mantels, wood and tile. These options can all look amazing, but they can be very costly. Most of the options are permanent fixtures, so once it’s done, it’s done, there’s no going back!
So…. Here is how we did our DIY fireplace for our home!
First… you have to find a fireplace!
Local buy and sell groups and kijiji always have many different options to choose from. First decide which option will go best in your space, a corner unit, tall fireplace or short and long fireplace. This decision is very unique to your space. For example, I choose a large, tall fireplace for our living room for a few reasons; we had a large wall space to fill and the furniture within the living room is large and chunky.
The most important thing is that the electric fireplace component is in good shape and working properly (i.e. flame works, heat works, etc). The surroundings don’t have to be in perfect shape, you can fix that later.
I would say $200 should be the absolute maximum to pay for the fireplace. We were lucky enough to find ours for $50. Josh and I were on our way to dinner with my parents in Port Perry, when I found the fireplace. I messaged the gentleman and we picked it up before dinner. I was so excited!
Second…. How to make it your own!
Once you have purchased your fireplace, the fun begins. Now you can customize the fireplace to your specific taste. The first thing we did is add a shelf compartment to the back of the fireplace. This allows us to put the xbox and other tv components in a place where it isn’t going to be seen.
Design tip: Generally speaking you shouldn’t see your t.v components (i.e. dvd players, apple tv, xbox, vhs player… not kidding we just recently threw out ours from our spare room!) None the less, it provides a much more clean, sleek, organized look if your t.v components are not visible.
The next step was to fix any imperfections, Josh used bondo auto body filler (Yes you heard that correctly), in order to fill the chips and dog bites, (ugh yes dog bites), the household that we purchased our fireplace from had a pup that really enjoyed chewing the corners off the fireplace! So, Josh molded the corners back to normal using the bondo.
Next, we sanded the whole fireplace.
Then… the fun part! We painted the fireplace. In our case, we painted the fireplace white. However, you could go with whatever colour looks best within your space. The nice part about this DIY project is that you can easily change up the colour over time depending on the style of your home.
Lastly… the bestest best part, time to decorate. For our fireplace, once we put the t.v on top you could see the wires, so in order to cover the wires, I added greenery to the top of the fireplace. From there I mix and match decor depending on the season, typically I do candles, right now I have my bunnies there for Spring as well.
All and all our fireplace cost us $80. It is a focal piece in our living room and we added our personal touches to the fireplace to make it our own, which in my opinion is a fundamental part of decorating your home!
L & J