Baby It's Cold Outside: Fireplace Reveal

brynheimann

Jan 13, 20245 min read

Updated: May 4, 2024

Even in the early days of planning for our home addition, we knew we wanted a fireplace in the great room. In fact, you can see it in the preliminary design plans. However, when the financial reality of the project came rushing in -- we also knew we would have to wait.

Thankfully, that wait is now over ! In the summer of 2023, we were on a bit of a project hiatus and we were on the hunt for a realistic electric fireplace insert. After some serious online investigation and ogling after every electric fireplace we saw during our furniture acquisition project, the Mr. fell in love with the Dimplex Revillusion insert. This insert normally retails for close to $2,000.

In June 2023 we were chatting about the fireplace on the boat, as one does. The Mr. happened to look at his Amazon cart and notice that the fireplace insert was on sale for about $1,100 plus tax. My response: Buy it. Buy it now.

Well, he did -- the catch was that it didn't show up at our house until October 2023. Ha ! No matter. This fall, we set out to do the surprisingly difficult work of choosing and building a fireplace surround for our fancy insert.

I'm going to give you an overview of some of the challenges and solutions, then I'll give you what everyone really wants: Pictures.

Challenge 1: Our house is a raised ranch and the great room is on the second floor. If we had thought more critically about the fireplace earlier in the process, we may have added structural re-enforcement to the floor of the great room to support a real stone fireplace. However, we did not think of that. This limited us as we were choosing surround material because we wanted something that looked like real stone, but was much lighter and able to be supported by the existing floor.

Solution 1: The Mr. found this genius product called Evolve stone. Looks real and is super light weight, plus has the option for some pretty big blocks. Not only is this material light weight and realistic looking, but it is super easy to cut and install if you have a brad nailer.

Challenge 2: Surround sizing. Like, how big to make this thing?

Solution 2: We found some helpful articles from designers on making your fireplace surround proportionate to the size of your TV, if you plan to mount the TV over the fireplace - which we did. I guess the ratio is something like the TV should be about 2/3 the size of the surround. When we were initially building the surround I thought "This thing is huge-mongous", but now with the TV mounted over-top I concur with the professionals. It would have looked funny if we hadn't over-sized it to accommodate the TV.

Challenge 3: The mantel. Size, material, aesthetic, oh my !

Solution 3: I had my heart set on a sleek and natural white oak mantel that I saw in someone's blog. It was beautiful. However, the reality is that around here none of our local hardware options (Menards, Home Depot, Lowes) carry white oak. In fact, even a local building supply/ lumber place also indicated that they did not carry white oak. We ended up buying almost all board options from Menards and bringing them home to see which one looked best in our space with the stone material. We ended up with red oak. If you aren't sure, I recommend this approach. You can return the boards that you don't like.

We also decided to make it a 6x6 box. Although 6 inches as you view the mantel from the front looks right to me, I do sometimes wish I had made it a little wider so I could put some larger decorative items on it. All in all though, it turned out really nice.

Challenge 4: To raised hearth or to go straight up?

Solution 4: Most electric insert fireplaces that I see on the interwebs just go straight up and don't bother with a raised hearth. However, we were specifically going for a more traditional look. So, I made the Mr. put in a raised hearth. I like it, but I understand that the look isn't for everyone. Also, we have a lot of space in this room. If I had been more space constrained, I would have just gone straight up.

Challenge 5: Hearth stone choice?

Solution 5: If you opt for a raised hearth, you're going to need a hearth stone. This means, you're going to have to select a hearth stone dimension and material. I'll admit that we opted for a (perhaps) temporary and inexpensive solution. You guessed it: we painted a pine board and called it a day. We'll probably swap this out for something more substantial eventually, but for now - it is fine. I've even had a guest ask us if it is made out of granite, LOL.

Ok, now the good stuff. Here's how it all started, on October 25th, 2023 with a frame.

Next up, enclose your frame with some OSB.

OSB is only required for the part of the frame that will include the stone product. Above that, we installed drywall.

We also moved the TV outlet to make it a bit more accessible and painted the OSB in flat black paint. The stone product is mortarless, so we want for there to be black between stones.

Next, we painted the drywall. We sanded the paint to give the drywall a similar finish to the other walls in the room. Please be cautious though not to add too much sand to the paint. #AskMeHowIKnow

Another learning here: we probably should have waited to paint the OSB black until after we had painted the drywall. We ended up just touching up the black paint - but we could have saved ourselves the trouble by just completing tasks in the correct order.

Here was the exciting part - we got to start applying the stone to the fireplace surround.

At this stage, we ran out of the Evolve stone material. We had purchased 2 boxes and weren't quite sure if we would need a third box. Well, we needed it and had to wait for it to be delivered. While we waited, we proceeded with the mantel install.

Since nice red oak is kind of expensive, the Mr. mitered a red oak box mantel. This also helps with weight because oak is a dense wood. Also, in the picture below, you can see that we painted our pine board hearthstone. We just got a bunch of samples and tried to select a color that didn't clash.