Making progress!

At this point we may have as much money into stain samples as we do wood supplies.  It took me about 10 stains to land on this one.  I finally decided to go with something that is pretty close to the rest of our woodwork.  Today Susie stained the mantel and after one more coat of varnish we will be ready to mount it onto the bricks.  Not sure how long that step will take!  Once that is complete, we want to paint the insert black.  Making progress!!! 

Making progress on the new fireplace mantel!

All home improvement projects at the Bormann household take three attempts! And we are on round three for the fireplace mantel and are getting close to completion! So what is left? Right now Keith is working on a thin board that goes underneath the mantel, then we are still determining our best option for the top board. Then all that will need to be done is to stain it and mount it onto the bricks.

Keith's parents have many hours of wood staining under their belts and have offered to help stain it when they come visit in two weeks. So we are on a timeline to completion! I'm still not certain what shade of stain I will use, most likely something similar to the rest of our woodwork even though I'm not a big fan of the color of our woodwork. Then I'm thinking about spray painting the doors/gold insert either black or a nickel silver color. I need to look into it a little further, I'm guessing I might need a special type of paint and I don't want to mess it up.

This is our temporary mantel! Like it? We will sell it to you!

Look what we got ourselves into!

A little background! From the first day we bought our house, I planned to have our fireplace mantel to be the first log in the fire! Well, 3 1/2 years later, we still have this AWFUL mantel!!!
A couple weeks ago, Keith started itching for a house project to do, so I said, how about the mantel! Yes, this could be a challenging project, but honestly, it has nowhere to go but up! So we decided we could pretty much build a frame around the existing mantel.
Today was Keith's off Friday, so he spent a majority of his day working on the project, even rented an air nail gun, only to find that the existing mantel is anything but square! So we went to Menard's tonight to by some wood to make it square, otherwise the corners wouldn't have lined up.
We had tossed the idea around of just tearing the board off several times over the past years, but both feared that we would some how end up destroying some of the bricks and get ourselves into an even bigger project.
So tonight after the boys went to bed, Keith went back to work and I was looking at the fireplace and said, I bet we could chisel that mantel off. So Keith walks over to the mantel, got under almost in a squat position and got his big muscles ready to force it off and the minute his fingers pushed up against the wood, it popped with barely any efforts. So at that point we just burst out laughing since Keith spent the entire day building a piece to work with it and both of us thought we had attempted to lift it up in the past!
So that means we had to go back to the drawing board!

Keith has a new plan now, so we will keep you posted.