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ther than providing heat, a fireplace is meant to act as the centerpiece for the room it is in. Having an Like it or not, winter is coming. It’s time to make your fireplace a little more cozy to be around. Mak overs Fireplace O By Dustin Bates
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fresh canvas without all the mess and hassle. (Just make sure you are anchored appropriately to support the weight of the new materials. Use a lag bolt or screw the ply- wood to a stud behind the brick, if possible. Or, you can anchor bolt it into the mortar between bricks.) From there, the possibilities of your design are endless. When it comes to the design itself, you just need to ask yourself what you are trying to get out of your new fireplace. For example, one couple came to me with a few simple requests for their update: They wanted a place for pictures, an actual mantel for their son’s Christmas stocking and some of the old brick exposed so they didn’t lose all of the vintage look. With that in mind, I was able to simply cover the desired areas with plywood, as I mentioned ear- lier, and then just started crossing
old, outdated look to yours may be the reason you can’t quite capture the feel of the room you are going for. For our purposes, I’ll be talking about updating an all-brick fireplace, since that’s what you see a lot of the time in vintage homes. Don’t be scared of taking on a project like this. Sometimes “DIY” can simply mean Design It Yourself, while you hire a professional to take care of what you don’t feel comfortable with. Any builder will tell you that starting with a clean slate is the best way to begin a project. In our instance, with a brick fireplace, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to rip all the brick off the wall (which is a huge pain). If the structure is sound, simply anchoring 3 / 4 ” plywood onto the brick with the proper screws/bolts and glue can give you a
VintageKC / Fall 2014 44
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