Hey guys, I'm Nate welcome back to the workshop. Having a fireplace in your house can be really great
But if you don't have one, getting one installed can cost thousands of dollars. In our last video
we showed you how to build the body of this fireplace and today we're going to be finishing it up
So it looks like it's made of authentic brick and wood to make the bricks.
We'll be using this wood grained contact paper
Most of the outside of the fireplace is going to be covered in the bricks made from these foam sheets
So let's get slicing! each of these foam sheets is 12 inches wide and 18 inches long.
So let's cut it into eighteen bricks. That are six inches long and two inches wide
There you go, you can see we get quite a few bricks out of one sheet,
which is good because we have a lot of fireplace to cover.
There you have it, we've now cut up eight of those sheets of foam into bricks
So it's time to start applying them to our fireplace.
Update you can now see that we have covered the whole front of our fireplace in our foam bricks for the most part
It's pretty basic,
we started just by putting this arch over the curved part of the opening of the fireplace
and then everything else kind of got built around that. We have a little bit of a staggered pattern of the whole bricks and the
partial bricks on the sides. For the partial bricks
I just lined up approximately where the next brick should be and cut it off with a pair of scissors
I did the same thing with these small
weirdly shaped pieces where they intersect with the curves or angled bits on the archway. You can see I've got these pieces here and here
that I had to sort of custom shape. It's pretty easy to do, you lay it down
draw about where it should be cut with a pen cut it out if it fits great if it doesn't cut more if you cut
It too much get a new one now at the front of our fireplace bricked-up
I'm gonna move on to the sides and do the same thing there one thing to note is these small pieces of foam that are
Acting as the ends of bricks
I'm going to try and line those up
With full-length bricks on the sides so that it looks like the edge of a brick actually set into a fireplace
There we have it, we've now bricked up the front and the sides of our fireplace
And I have to say I think it's looking pretty good. So the next step is to paint it
We did use the red and brown sort of British colors for the foam
But we are going to cover almost all of that color
So you can really use whatever colors a foam that you want now this foam has a very open and porous surface on it
Which means that it doesn't always take paint very well at first it will sort of drink in the colour
And you'll lose a lot of what you try to apply to it so before we add any paint to it
we're going to take a heat gun and go over this whole thing the heat will actually make the cells on the phone sort of
Close up, and it will give a smoother shiny texture, which will take our paint a lot better
I also want to point out that I ended up with a lot of leftover bricks in fact
I have over two whole sheets worth of these bricks
And I used eight to make this which means you could probably get away. Just fine with only using six
As
you can probably see it doesn't take a lot of time on any one piece of foam you can keep moving fairly quickly
The foam is now fairly sealed and should take paint pretty well there may be some people out there very familiar with this craft foam
Who might suggest a few other steps using evey a glue and some Plasti Dip to get a really nice
Sealed coating on this foam but for our purposes. Just the heat gun should be enough the last step
We're gonna take before we add paint is I'm going to use the hot glue gun to fill in a few of the gaps where
the edges of the bricks meet
There we go our bricks are attached
They're sealed and we got gaps filled so now let's go over it with some paint and the first kind of paint
I'm going to use is this stone textured spray paint
It's really going to help give our bricks a much more realistic
Texture this stone textured spray paint is a little more expensive than most spray paint it costs about 10 bucks at Walmart
We've added a stone texture spray to the bricks
And I really like how it's looking but this stuff can take a few hours to dry so now we need to let it sit
Until it's safe to handle well the textured paint is drying. Let's make our mantelpiece look like it's actually made out of wood
We've got this wood grain contact paper, which is kind of like a roll of tape
That's 18 inches wide and 20 feet long
I'm using this color of wood grain because it was available at Home Depot for about 15 bucks if you look online
There are probably a lot of other colors or patterns if you prefer that what we want to do is measure a piece
That's long enough to cover our whole mantel cut that off then peel off the backing on this sticker paper
And then attach it over the whole thing at once
I've got a little bit of a wrinkled edge here, so I'm first just gonna trim that off
So I have a nice straight edge there we go
I want it for you long enough to reach all the way across the mantel down the edge
And then overlap just about an inch or so on the bottom. I'm gonna give myself some extra. I've got about four inches here
I'd probably only need two and a half or so inches, but I'm gonna give myself
margin of error same thing on this side
Well snip to measure that and then the back of the contact paper
Has gridlines all over it so it's easy to follow making sure you're getting a nice straight line
If you're looking for where to buy this stuff. It's usually called shelf liner
It's designed to put on the inside of shelves to make them look like they're a little more
Fancy and less just plain particle board or something now
We need to do is peel off the backing to this strip of contact paper without getting it all wrinkled up remember
This is basically a giant piece of tape at this point
So I just have to make sure it doesn't stick to itself and get too wrinkled now
We're gonna want this attached to our board to try and make it go on nice and evenly
We can't just flip it upside down and press it on that does seem like it'd be the easiest way
But I've tried that and it never goes on really nice and smooth
So we do have to do something a little more careful than that so to start
Let's take our mantel piece and fit it I'm not gonna put it right in the center
I'm gonna put it a little farther toward the back because the back
Doesn't really need to be perfectly lined our fireplace is going to be sitting up against a wall if that doesn't have quite enough
Coverage or anything like that. It won't be a big
So overlapping just by about an inch and trying to keep it nice and straight so that our contact paper will go over it straight
and to attach this
Down onto the paper
See that it's sticking to it like I said
It's basically tape so now what we're gonna try and do is lift it up and start laying it down
Over the top of our mantle one bit at a time
You can now see what it's supposed to look like
We now have our contact paper stretched out all the way across our mantle as you can see it like I said there would be
There are some bubbles and some slight wrinkles
But we can actually get most of those out just by carefully pressing them down if we're able to push the bubble to an edge
Then all of the air can easily escape and we can usually get rid of it entirely
If you have any bubbles that are in the middle of your board
And you just can't get rid of them completely the air is probably stuck and can't escape
What we need to do is take a sharp razor blade or a pin and poke a very small hole in part of the bubble
This should allow all of the air to escape and your bubble to disappear
There we go our contact paper is now
Nicely secured to the top of our mantle let's turn off the excess and attach it to the sides
And see here's one edge
I want it to reach down to the bottom of the mantle and then maybe about an inch on the bottom to wrap around
So let's cut off our extra about here
We'll want the contact paper to wrap around the front of our mantle and the side
But this corner piece is just gonna get in our way
So let's try and cut that out
We're gonna cut lines into our contact paper lined up with the front edge and the side edge of the mantle
Now let's pull our rap fairly tight over the edge and
Rap it down over the bottom of the mantle
We can see that even though I trimmed the sheet there's a little bit of overlap on to the front
That's alright that will help prevent there being any gap in between the front and the side
So we're just going to put a little slit right here
So these will fold down evenly and then they'll get covered by our front sheet
Now just to take out a few more wrinkles and spots where it's not quite even I'm going to lightly go over the contact paper
With the low heat setting on the heat gun
With the wood print attached to our mantle
We're now ready to move back to the body of our fireplace and finish with the paint job
I'm going with this sort of darker red the color on the can is colonial red
And I think it makes a really good sort of faded brick look. I've got three colors of paint
I'm gonna be using the red that I already pointed out is going to be my primary brick color
I have a little bit of this caramel color that I'm going to be using on the inside of the fireplace to give it that
Sort of fire brick look and then I've got black which I'm gonna lay down everywhere
That should be pretty covered with soot on the inside of the fireplace
There we go our fireplace is now looking a lovely brick shade of red however real bricks are very rarely one smooth uniform color
So to make it look a little more realistic
Let's take a few different colors of acrylic paint some crumpled up paper and sort of sponge paint that on all over to give it
a more mottled look
Using just a little bit of acrylic paint and a paintbrush
I added mortar into all of the gaps between the bricks and that really makes it pop
I think now the bricks look like bricks instead of just like a red textured wall so I love doing that part
We've only got one step left before we permanently attach our mantel on top and finish our fireplace
That's to take our black spray-paint and go over and just add a little bit of built-up soot onto our fireplace
Beautiful be
Beautiful love adding weathering to stuff mmm something looks so good like it looks good before and then you add weathering and you're like BAM
It's perfect
Now all we need to do is attach our mantle and our fireplace will be complete
To attach this we're gonna use the hot glue gun again and to start
I'm just gonna put two little points of glue on the very back that will hold it in place so that when I put the
Bead down on the front. I know it's not going to shift forward backward or sideways at all
There you go mantle piece attached you can see you can lift the whole fireplace up by the mantel I
Mean it only weighs like this whole thing is probably like
six pounds
Maybe I don't know it's very lightweight for a whole fireplace of course. Yeah, mantel attached looks like wood the bricks look like brick
Fantastic this thing makes such a cool decorative piece, but to finish it off
There's one more thing it needs and that's a fire in the fireplace of course
We don't want a real fire this thing's made of foam it will melt and burn and fall apart and smell terrible
We can't have that so we have a good substitute. Yeah there we go a
Nice log fire to go in our fireplace
This is a neat little artificial log fireplace setup that is actually also a heater. It puts out real heat, so you can have
Fireplace with a fire and heat all coming from one spot. It's pretty cool now to make this work
There is a cord that comes off of our fire
And we need to be able to get that to an outlet
So let's cut just a small hole in the bottom of the back of our fireplace so the cord has a place to get out
Beautiful
That is so great now. It's like a real functional fireplace. You've got the nice warm glow
You've got the look of the flames in the background. You've got the warmth coming off of it everything you could need from a fireplace
There you have it now
You're all prepared to relax by your own homemade fireplace
If it happens to be near Christmas time your homemade fireplace can be the perfect spot to hang some stockings
That was a real fire
You would really not want that stocking to hang that low
But that's all right this isn't gonna catch your stockings on fire there you have it how to build your very own brick fireplace
It's way lower cost and takes a lot less time than putting in a real one there are of course some
Limitations like no real fire in your fireplace, and there's a limit to how much weight you can put on top of it
But it really does a good job of looking like a fireplace. I love having one of these things
Thanks for joining us for this video and remember to come gear yourself up with products and merch at the king of random
Calm see you there you
Can cut right through bricks with a razor blade, it's amazing it hit you in your face. It wouldn't even hurt
You