Mantel Facelift

I promised my friend Lisa I'd give her mantel a facelift.    All of the houses in our development have these weird gigantic fireplaces with tiny little concrete mantels.  Yuk! 


This is my original mantel before I hit it with the sledgehammer
What a great day that was!  Love those plastic ivy plants.

Here it is right after I finished the new mantel

and Here it is now

I'd still like to add to it but haven't quite decided how.   It was an involved process.  There were stepped  brick corbels that supported the original concrete mantel

I had to chisel them away to install the fascia piece directly to the brick.  As I said it was quite involved.

Here's Lisa's mantel

With the same weird stepped brick support.  

We're going to try to keep this face lift simple and avoid the whole demolition stage.

You can see where I'm going with this!  I hope it works.  I'm going to do an overlay and not even remove the old concrete mantel.  Wish me luck.  I think the biggest challenge is going to be getting the 12 foot boards home!