DIY Faux Fireplace and Stained Mantel

Aloha!

I’m excited to share a project I did for a customer a few months ago. She came to me with a few different inspiration ideas for a faux fireplace, and I was so excited to build one. Here in Hawaii, you don’t see many fireplaces, so a faux fireplace was a really fun project to help a “mainlander” feel more at home.

One of the pictures my customer shared with me and loved is this one by Ashley of Smashing DIY:

We both really loved the clean look of Ashley’s faux fireplace, and I knew I wanted to use her tutorial for the scale and bones of the project. My customer really wanted a thicker, wood-stained mantel, and we opted to leave out the hearth, so the fireplace just sits right on the floor.

**This post contains affiliate links.

Building the Faux Fireplace Carcass

I built the carcass as per Ashley’s plans, and it was so fun to see it already come to life!

Changes to the Mantel and Fireplace Surround

I also chose to use 1/2″ plywood to cover instead of MDF. Due to the humidity here in Hawaii, MDF doesn’t seem to last long, unfortunately. I’m happy with how the plywood turned out, and it was easy to install with my brad nailer.

Trimming the Faux Fireplace

I trimmed this one using 1 11/16″ pine lattice moulding, and for the mantel, I used two 1×8 pine boards and framed it in with 1×3 pine. All attached with wood glue and brad nails and filled in with DAP wood putty The top is stained in this color.

For the finishing touch, I drilled a circular hole in the back with a hole saw for a cord to go through. Now they can use a flickering bulb to really make it look like there’s a fire glowing!

Finished dimensions of my faux fireplace:

You can see that I omitted the base with drawer and changed the mantel slightly from Ashley’s plans. The finished dimensions of my fireplace are as follows:

Entire fireplace with mantel is 43.75″ tall x 55″ wide x 15.75″ deep. White base portion is only 14″ deep x 53″ wide, but I chose to have my mantel overhang slightly.

I used this flickering bulb from Amazon.

And this basic white lamp cord with switch for only $8. And I even bought some birch logs from Amazon! I’ve used the same ones in my own fireplace with the same cord and bulb for the last few years. Even though our fireplace is fully functional, we don’t have much use for a fire here. Ha!

Aloha,

Charlee