Family Room Mantle

19 October 2015

Family Room Mantle

Here is a picture of our family room mantle decorated for Thanksgiving. Canadian Thanksgiving was last weekend, but I'll keep the display up until it's time to decorate for Christmas.

Carl installed the mantle a few months ago, but I'm finally sitting down to update the blog!

Here's where we started with it...

It amazes me every time I look back, just how huge the transformation is in this house!

I wrote a post about painting the fireplace, which you can read here

For the mantle, we wanted to install a rustic barn beam, and would you believe we actually had this one given to us?! We were so thrilled with it, as it was exactly what we were looking for!

It needed to be trimmed a bit to fit the space between the bricks, and Carl and his friend Brad spent some time brainstorming how to hang it without any visible hardware showing. They came up with this design...

They cut a slice in the back for the rail to then sit flat along the back

This mantel actually came with the back and top marked for us!

Then Carl used an impact or hammer drill to install the anchors and screws into the brick

This was the scene behind Carl while he was drilling!

They're so funny about noise!

Here are all 5 holes drilled

This was the how the bolt looked in the brick

Next, Carl leveled the rail and secured it with the screws

While he was working on the rail, the mantle was being used as a roadway...

It's a difficult choice to work with the kids around, but the alternative is to work on things while they're asleep at night, which is impossible because the tools are too noisy. So, I balance the kids and the camera (semi-well) while Carl tackles the project. It doesn't always work smoothly!

Now, the beam was ready to be mounted

It fit like a glove, and then I held the mantle while Carl screwed bolts from the top down into the holes of the rail

It's on my to-do list to tackle the fresh cut areas of the beam, to weather them a bit to look more uniform. Apparently I can take muddy water and scrub the areas to colour them. Someday...

Here was the finished mantle that evening

I had a lot of fun decorating it for Thanksgiving!

The bunting was one of my Pinterest DIY projects that I pinned years ago! You can find it on this blog, Simple As That. I'm really happy with how it turned out, and it was a quick and easy afternoon project using leaves from our backyard

And again, how it looks today!