Wednesday, September 9, 2009

DIY Mantle

ASPTL



It's been a few weeks since the majority of the transformation on our new house took place, but I wanted to share one of the projects from our new house for A Soft Place to Land's DIY Day.


Back at the beginning of August, my mom found a new store where the majority of my paycheck will now be going to. If you love DIY-projects, you need to see if your town has a ReStore. ReStore is full of anything you will find in a house - as contractors gut and renovate homes, they will take the old stuff to ReStore to sell. All of the proceeds go to help the Habitat for Humanity. So you get some quailty stuff to update your home, and it helps out a good cause!


*Disclaimer* The pictures are being weird. Sorry about that!!




This is the mantle that my found. It was $25. People, this is SOLID, QUALITY wood. Definitely worth more than $25. I saw on the ReStore website that they typically sell stuff 75% off retail price!







So I started with the mantle, and then took my friend, Sandpaper Block, to even out some off the knicks on it.














Just wanted to give you a close up of the details!










After smoothing it out and cleaning the dust off, we set out to paint it our favorite color of furniture: BLACK. Kills my dad that with every piece of nice wood furniture my mom gets, the first words out of her mouth are, "Isn't this going beautiful when I paint it black?" He always protests to begin with, yet comes around in the end!! ((excuse the extra concentrated face I'm making!))





Then you grab you handy helpers and have them attach wood to the brick wall, making sure it is level. I will brag on Cody and my dad right now. They eye-balled where the wood needed to go and when we checked it with the level, it was PERFECT!

















Secure it to make sure it won't fall once decorations are up...












Here was the brick wall before...

















and viola!!





















You'll have to excuse the mess around the fireplace. Those have finally been unpacked, but were replaced with others! Some day the house will be put together!

Come back next week to see more affordable projects thanks to ReStore!

5 comments:

  1. I've not heard of ReStore before, so I'll have to check to see if we have one. Thanks for the tip! And I DO like the mantle better painted black.

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  2. i've read a lot of bloggers talking about ReStore but we don't have one.

    your mantle looks great!!!!!!!!!!!!

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  3. Wow, looks great. What a big difference a mantle can make, huh?

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  4. I want a ReStore. Sounds cool. Love the new black mantel!!!

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  5. Yet, I have another DIY mantel idea to share.
    It comes when couple of years ago we need to get classic mantel for house renovation project, but all offers on the market were tremendously costly. So we went thinking out of the box and made it from antique-looking hutch, very classic and “very english”, as other people said. I guess, you can have a look at pictures and get that idea for your projects.

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Thanks for commenting- I love hearing from readers!