Hey guys, I'm Nate welcome back to the workshop
I love the look and feel of sitting in front of a fireplace if you don't have one though it could be thousands of dollars
And a lot of paperwork with the city to get one installed if it's possible at all
Now the purpose of today's video is to come up with a substitute
Fireplace that can go into any building with no paperwork at all and for very little cost some of you may be asking
But why because it's cool. Plus I really love building stuff that you can make it look really cool
This is a fancy decorative piece that looks surprisingly good. If you do it
Well this project is going to be broken up into two videos and the first one we will build the structural shape of the fireplace
And in the second one will do all the decorative bits that make it look like a real brick construction most of the materials
We'll need are these sheets of foam core board and these sheets of four millimeter craft foam
These foam core boards are 20 inches by 30 inches
They are available at a whole lot of different craft stores, and these ones actually by the dollar store
They are surprisingly one dollar each, so that's pretty good price
This is the same stuff that we've used before with our styro-slicer'
To make stuff like this fighter jib these foam core sheets often come in a variety of colors white and black are the most common
We're going with black just because it's a little bit easier to film these craft foam sheets come in a variety of colors and thicknesses
We're using the thickest kind that I saw available
It's 0.2 inches or about four
Millimeters thick the color of these foam sheets shouldn't really matter because they will be covered in paint
But I did get a couple that are fairly close in color
To the brick look that we're going to want to hold everything together in this fireplace
We're also going to need a good glue gun now that we have all of our supplies. Let's start building to start
Let's grab four pieces of our foam core board that will become the front and back of the fireplace
These boards are 20 inches wide and 30 inches tall we want to keep the 30 inch height
but we actually want to take one inch off of each of our boards so that our final fireplace is 30 inches tall and
38 inches wide you may be wondering why don't we just leave it the full 40 inches wide?
So we don't have to cut a 1 inch strip off the actual reason for that is that the spacing of the bricks will work
Out much nicer if it's 38 inches wide instead of 4 you
Anytime we cut strips or pieces off of our foam core don't throw them away because we can still use them later
We're going to glue the edges of these two pieces of foam core together and those will become the front of our fireplace
The front of our fireplace however is going to have an opening in it
So let's draw and cut that out before we glue the pieces together
We'll want the whole opening to be twenty-two inches wide which means we'll take eleven inches off of either side
The version of the fireplace that I'm building will have a slight arch at the top of it if you want to make a different
Shape you're welcome to do that as well anything can work
My opening will be twenty-two inches wide it will come up approximately seventeen and a half inches at the sides
And then in the middle it will come up about two inches higher than that to about nineteen and a half
Maybe 20 inches I have my two marks at 11 inches in so now
I'm just going to measure seventeen and a half inches up from there and now a mark in the center about two inches higher
somewhere around nineteen and a half
Maybe 20 inches and now have the two sides of my opening marked and where the top of my opening will go so what I?
Need to do is draw a nice curved line that connects the two sides
Running through my 19 and a half inch mark in the center
Now let's take our ruler and our razor blade and cut those pieces out on the curve of course
I can't put a ruler up against it, so I am just gonna have to freehand it with the razor blade a little bit
With those two pieces cut out you can now see the shape of the front of our fireplace is starting to take once again
Don't throw away the pieces that you cut out because we're still going to use them now those pieces are cut we're ready to glue
the two halves of the front of our fireplace together
With our glue gun let's run a bead along the edge of one board lay it down flat on the table and press it flat
And then press the other board into it so the edges line up perfectly
Clean away a little bit of this glue if you do this while the glue is too
Hot you will burn your hands the fact that I'm wearing gloves actually does help a little bit it protects my fingers from the heat
of the glue
We've now cut and glued the front panel of our fireplace to make it a little more
Structurally sound let's add some strips of foam core to the back of it glued on to both sides
This will really help. It keep its shape and prevent it from cracking. If there's any movement
Let's use one of the 1 inch strips that we cut off the side of our panels and cut a few pieces four inches long
With a front panel assembled
Let's set it aside and make the back panel the process for the back panel is the same as the front except
We don't cut out an opening so let's cut off one inch strip from the sides
And then glue it together down the seam in the middle
With the last piece we use three strips of foam core to
Reinforce the scene we want to do the same thing on this side
But we need to make sure that those strips aren't going to be visible because it'd be pretty ugly
So let's be careful about where we put them laying the front piece on top of the back piece. We can see that
There's a portion that will not be visible and we can put our reinforcing strips there
Let's also put one down at the bottom. Which will be used to help build the bottom of the fireplace later
There we have it now, we've built the back panel of the fireplace
Let's go back to the front panel and add some side and support pieces for the side panels
Let's make them the same width as these pieces that we already cut out from the front as you recall these panels are 11 inches
wide
Since we've used the entire height of the board of the panel our fireplace is 30 inches tall that means for our side panels
Let's cut out two pieces that are each 11 by 30 inches
We now have our two side panels cut out
And we'll also use these two pieces we cut from the front as interior side panels
It's going to be important that all of our side panels are at a nice 90 degree angle from our front and back panels
So let's cut a few angle pieces that will help us keep those side panels. Just the way we want them
I'm making some two inch squares that I'm then going to cut diagonally to give us some nice 90-degree angles now
Let's secure these right angle pieces to the backside of our front panel with these glued down when we attach our side panel
We'll have a nice 90 degree guide to be sure that it's a line straight up and down
With these pieces that we cut out of the middle and are now using as interior side pieces
Make sure that you have the narrow end lined up with the size that matches it
You don't want to take the wide end and put that on the edge here
Or you'll have a lot of weird overlap and you might be able to see the narrow end through the back of the fireplace
Just attach it as though over a door that you cut off and is swinging over
That's the first two panels attached and now let's attach the ones on the other side
With the edges attached to the front of our fireplace we can now see that it stands up on our own
And we're getting a really good look at how it's going to come together now we need to attach our back panel to our side
panels
The main body of the fireplace is progressing really nicely
So now let's add a floor right here this piece of support on the back is actually going to help hold up our floor
Let's add a one inch strip connecting these two front points here
And then we'll have a panel that goes on top of all of that before we add our strip
Let's cut out the shape that we're going to need for that panel
We could grab a new foam core board
But we have these two pieces that we cut off of our side panels so to avoid wasting too much material
Let's use these to make our floor one of these panels alone isn't deep enough to reach the back of our board
That's 11 inches back, and these are only about 9 inches wide, so let's glue these two pieces together
And then we'll have a large enough board that we can cut out the right size and shape for the bottom of our fireplace
This piece should now fit nicely into the space. We've got
We still have some leftover 1-inch strips, so let's cut one of those to be the right size to fit right in this gap
To start attaching our floor, let's just run a bead along this support. We have on the back
With the back little bit of glue attached now let's run a bead along the front and press that down as well
Now we have a couple inches in the back and the whole front attached
But our sides and especially our back corners are still very loose looking at the bottom of the fireplace
We can see how that bottom panel isn't very well connected everywhere so what we want to do is
Reinforce all along the edges to make sure it really is holding itself up well
To reinforce it a little bit extra in the corners. Let's even take a couple of one-inch pieces and glue those down
So it's really getting support from the sidewall as well
Our bottom is now pretty well attached
But we are going to want it to hold a little bit of weight so to add some support
Let's just take a few one-inch pieces and glue those around
Those will reach down from this panel on to the floor where our fireplace is resting there
We have it the floor of the fireplace is now really nicely attached
It's stuck on both front and back all the sides
And it has some extra support in the middle
At this point the main body of the fireplace is mostly complete so what we need to do is add a top piece a mantel
That goes on top of the fireplace
When we made the front and back pieces of our fireplace we trimmed off one inch from either side of the panels now we want
To have a mantelpiece that extends one inch over the edge
Making the bricks fit was one reason to trim down the edges
This is the other with a new piece of foam core
We need to cut out four panels that reach from the middle of our fireplace out to one inch beyond the edge
We also want the mantel piece to extend one inch beyond the front of our fireplace so we need to take a measurement that will
Take us from the very back of the fireplace to one inch beyond the front our side walls
We know are 11 inches
but we also have to account for the thickness of the foam core itself currently our whole fireplace is approximately 11 and
5/16 inches wide so now we need to cut four pieces that are 20 inches long and 12 and
5/16 inches wide
Pervert
Three more of those now these four pieces will become the top and bottom of our mantle first
Let's glue the edges of two of the pieces together
Now one of these is bottom and one of these is the top and to secure the two together we want to take some 1
Inch strips and go all the way around one of them and then attach the other one on top of those
Now before we secure the top piece onto this bottom piece
I want to do sort of the same thing that we did with the very bottom of the fireplace and that's just add a few
Little cross pieces to add a little bit of structural support on to our mantel
You know we've got the front attached, let's try attaching the side
The front and the sides now, let's just try and get a little bit onto the back
There we go our mantelpiece is now constructed and holding itself together pretty. Well. There is a couple little bits of cleanup
I want to do and I have a little bit of a lip so I want to cut that off
So it's nice and flush all the way across this product
There we have it our mantle is now complete and rests nicely on top of our fireplace
This whole part of the fireplace has used seven pieces of the foam core build since I bought them at the dollar store
That's only seven bucks for a whole fireplace not too bad
We're not going to attach the mantel to the body of a fireplace just yet
We're gonna wait until we've added some more of the decorative elements to the fireplace and the mantel itself
Thanks for joining us for this video join us tomorrow as we finish up our fireplace and remember to come gear yourself up with products
And merch at the king of random calm. See you there
It only probably takes 20 to 30 seconds to cool down and after the point we can let go of it
But it still seems like it takes a long time
You