When we moved into our new home, I knew that one of the first things I wanted to tackle was the fireplace in the family room. It is a gas fireplace that is flush against the wall. I grew up with an actual wood burning fireplace, so the fact that this was only gas had me skeptical. It was ugly, dated, and really stuck out like a sore thumb. I originally thought we would just remove the whole fireplace in general, and cover it up. A gas fireplace just really seemed like such a waste of space!
My husband and I went back and forth on what we wanted to do. Should we take it out? Should we leave it in? As we went over ideas during our first few weeks of living here, it quickly turned into winter and became freezing cold in the evenings. We decided to test out that fireplace and see what it could really do. To our surprise, it heated up the whole room! (If my fireplace had feelings, I definitely owed it an apology for thinking it was worthless). In fact, it became so warm that I worried my kids would hurt themselves on the glass wall the fire was behind.
Now that we knew it worked, we had some really big decisions to make. What would we do with this odd wall? The builder of the home had the fireplace off center to the wall due to some gas line issues. We knew we had to pick something that wouldn’t draw attention to the placement of the actual fireplace. I thought about just replacing the tiles around the fireplace with decorative tiles.
Soon after we realized that any decorative tiles would make the fireplace placement obvious. If we wanted decorative tiles to go from one end of the wall to the other, one side would have extra tiles cut in half. No thank you. My dream was a shiplap fireplace. This would be a simple, easy, and affordable way to hide the fireplace off set placement and give that modern farmhouse feel that I love. After some research, I came to the conclusion that because of that extreme heat we felt when it was on, shiplap would be a big risk as a fire hazard! What a total bummer this was.
After talking with some contractors, we came up with the idea of just doing a very clean simple subway tile look with a simple wood mantle. We knew we wanted some kind of light fixtures to accent the wall, and found two great fixtures that would make the modern look really pop. Pretty soon our idea started coming to life.
The most difficult process was rewiring for the lighting. Once that was finished, it was only a matter of tiling and designing the right mantle.
The mantle took a little bit of time to decide on. After doing my research, and asking around locally, I found a local carpenter to construct my mantle for me. We decided on a 6” x 6” x 72″ mantle. (Similar mantle can be found HERE) I was so worried as it was being made that it would be too small or wouldn’t be big enough for me to place items on the actual mantle for decoration. The local carpenter insisted it would be perfect. Well, he was right. It is the perfect size for our fireplace and it turned out wonderful!
From start to finish the fireplace took about 5 days to complete. We are really happy with how it turned out, and feel like the subways tiles do a great job of hiding the off placement of the fireplace insert.
Items used:
Subway Tiles 4″x 12″ = HERE or it can be purchased at most home improvement stores
Similar Mantle= HERE
Light fixtures = HERE
