tadahouse: The one with the... Fireplace Face lift!

It has been gloomy and SUPER rainy the whole week here...until today! We came home from a nice sunny and warm long weekend in California on Tuesday night to nonstop rain and even flooding in some areas of Maryland. The dreary and ominous weather made me want to curl up on the couch with Dave and Pluto and sit by the fire. Unfortunately it's still a little too warm to be lighting the fireplace, but fortunately we're ready for the cold weather whenever it comes because the fireplace just got a face lift!

This is the before picture of the lovely fireplace, with a gold-colored door:

Some of you may remember this post where we showed you some of the gold-colored fixtures in the house. The fireplace door is probably one of the biggest eyesores. In case you haven't been able to tell, we are not fans of the gold or bronze fixtures in general. We started by measuring the firebox (or fireplace opening) and started Googling fireplace doors! We found this Slimline Satin Nickel door and placed an order. Within a week the new fireplace door arrived!

As always I am the one that comes up with all these (great!) ideas for projects and Dave has the hard job of actually making it happen. He started by removing the existing door. Here's a picture taken from inside of the firebox:

This is what the fireplace looked like after the old door was removed:

With a little bit of elbow grease, Dave was able to get the new door installed in no time! In this picture below, you can see the new fireplace door and the makeshift mantel above it. The shelf was somewhat functional, but not very pleasing to the eye. So the next project was to replace the makeshift shelf! We actually installed the door back in January and it wasn't until July that we started looking for a new mantel.

Due to fire code issues, we could not put in a full mantel surround (with the sides). There needs to be sufficient spacing between the firebox and any potentially flammable materials (like wood) and because of the placement of the fireplace near the door to the garage on one side there wasn't enough space to have the needed clearance. See picture below:

Instead of a full mantel surround, we settled for just getting a mantel shelf. Because the family room is does not get a lot of natural light, we wanted a white mantel to try to lighten up the room a little. Some Googling for "mantels" led me to Mantels Direct. They had really good customer service and the agent helped me figure out the dimensions of the mantel shelf that I would need. Again because of the placement of the fireplace so close to the door to the garage, we had to make sure that the shelf wasn't too long. We also wanted one that was deep enough that we could actually put stuff on it. As for the design, we wanted something simple with clean lines that is classic and wouldn't go out of style. We finally decided on the Madison:

Because it was a custom order shelf, it took about 2 weeks for it to arrive. We ordered it in an unfinished poplar even though it also comes already finished with white paint. I figured that for a $65 price difference, I could paint it myself. Here is the mantel shelf as it looked right out of the box:

After one coat of primer:

Then I painted two thin coats of Behr high-gloss interior paint in Decorator White, followed by two coats of glossy protective finish, both leftover from the bookshelf project. When I was done painting/glossing and the mantel shelf was dry, I passed it off to Dave for installation. The mantel shelf came with an "installation kit" which consisted of a thin piece of wood that served as a mounting brace and three wood screws. I was skeptical that the mounting brace would hold up the weight of the shelf. Since we were mounting the shelf directl on the brick wall, Dave went to Home Depot and got some screws that would actually screw into the mortar between the bricks. The task of attaching the mounting brace onto the brick wall was actually much more difficult that we had expected because it had to be exactly level or else the shelf would look crooked and stuff would slide off of it! Here's a picture of Dave after he finally got the mounting brace secured and level:

While I was waiting for the multiple coats of paint to dry on the shelf, I was also working on painting a mirror to go on the wall above the mantel shelf. I was inspired by pictures of mirrors on pinterest here, here, and here. I was out shopping one day at Home Goods and just stumbled upon this blue mirror that I thought would be perfect above the fireplace: