DIY Fireplace With Electric Logs

DIY Fireplace With Electric Logs

Good afternoon! I hope you all are having a lovely Saturday! Last year was the first time in a decade that we didn’t have a fireplace and I really missed having during the holidays. I’d really love to build something like this down the road but I’ve got a few things I’ve got to figure out mathematically based on the room and so for now I thought I’d just build a basic DIY Fireplace With Electric Logs so we could have something for this holiday season (and maybe a few more too before I actually attempt the more complex one).

The first thing I did was sketch it out so I could get the dimensions and proportions figured out. I had a few annoying things I had to work around including the fact that our box that houses the equipment for the Frame TV is quite low on the wall. That meant I could not hang the TV as high as I would have liked (without having to move the box which meant dealing with some electrical placement and then a whole lot of drywall repair). So first I measured to see the absolute highest I could hang the TV without the electrical box showing and then worked from there. Because I couldn’t make the mantel as high as I wanted based on the TV location I therefore also couldn’t make the mantel quite as wide as I’d hoped without running the risk it looked short and stubby. So with that in mind I ended up with this:

Then I started building. I used wood scraps I had left over from other projects (like building our hood, our hutch, our laundry room, and both our upstairs bookshelves and our downstairs bookshelves) and also had to go get some pieces I needed in specific sizes for this project. Here are some screenshots from our instagram stories of the general process…

I then found these faux bricks and used liquid nails so attach them to the inside back and side walls to help make it more realistic looking.

It’s starting to really come together now:

Then I ordered this set of electric logs. There were some that were quite a bit more realistic looking but they were all really pricey.

I used some pretty thin molding to make my frame because I didn’t have much space to work with between the TV and the top of the mantel but in retrospect I do wish I had gone a tiny bit thicker. I may make a thicker one at some point down the road.

Here is that wall when we moved in:

And here it is now:

Here’s a little video:

I didn’t take very many pictures because I just took them yesterday and it was overcast and rainy and therefore terrible for taking photos. I just took a few though so I could go ahead and share this project today. Hopefully I’ll have time to take more in the next week or two.