The Right Kind of Drama
It was love at first sight. Those glass doors on the side made my heart smile. This little electric fire place from Amazon melted me.
However, the price was a bit higher than I was interested in spending (as is everything, really), and the reviews said that the color was more of an ivory. Ivory would not do. I needed a clean, bright white. So, I did a ton of googling to see if anyone else had any success painting such a fire place and, what luck!, I found a bunch of tutorials on the subject. Score! Since I planned to paint it anyway, I found the same model fireplace in a different finish at a lower price and pounced.
After spending days assembling it, sanding it, priming it with oil based primer, and giving it two coats of semigloss, I was so excited to get it back to the bathroom and into place. It was super cute, but between the larger than life bathtub and vanity area, this pretty lady was not the star I had hoped she would be. The result was rather anticlimactic.
So. What to do? This little gal needed some height. I briefly considered finding a corner cabinet on Craigslist that I could mount above the fireplace, but after about 5 days of searching to no avail, my patience had run out. I would have to construct something. Enter MDF, more MDF, and caulk. Oh, and left over pieces of 2×4 from the closet framing.
Just throwing some MDF paneling up on the wall wouldn’t work; the space needed to look defined, built-in. So I started by cutting 1 x 4 MDF board the exact height from the top of the fireplace to the ceiling and installed that.
In order to support the MDF paneling, I used scraps from the 2 x4s that we took out of the former closet and cut the ends at 45 degree angles so that I could screw them into the wall.
Then I cut the MDF paneling to size, attached it to the 2x4s and caulked the seams.
But it still needed something more at the top, so I gave it a little crown made out of chair rail molding to cover the gap, then painted the whole kit-n-caboodle. My favorite part of this, honestly, was making that wreath. I’ll take a glue gun over a nail gun any day.
Copious detail shots incoming because this is my favorite feature in the house and it makes me so happy to look at it.