My wife and I have been gradually renovating our house for a while now. One of our first large projects was to renovate the living room, and the fireplace was a key part of that renovation. The fireplace originally had a marble surround, and an ornate hood mounted over it. The marble was very nice, but not really our style, and the hood definitely had to go. Read on for the full project writeup.

Here’s a ‘before’ picture:

After removing the hood and the existing fireplace trim, I drew the fireplace surround out on graph paper to get the measurements right. I used a neighbor's Federal-style surround for inspiration, and we had decided on using 6-inch slate tile for the tile surround. Once I had my plan, I gathered materials: pine and MDF boards were pretty much all I needed for the surround. I got the tile from a local shop, and picked up thinset mortar, grout, and chemicals to treat the tile at Home Depot.

I started out by prepping the tile: I laid it all out and applied several coats of a sealer/color enhancer from Miracle Sealants (http://www.miraclesealants.com). In between coats, I worked on prepping the marble. A good going-over with a random orbital sander with 60-grit sandpaper roughed up the surface enough to give the mortar a good surface to which to adhere.

Once the prep work was done, I started work on the wood surround. First was the pilasters: I used pine for the front and MDF for the sides. After cutting the pieces to size, I routed the flutes and inset on the front pieces:

I then assembled the pilasters using biscuit joinery, installed the moldings in the insets, and attached them to the wall using my nail gun:

The crosspiece was simple enough: pine front and MDF sides, with a simple profile routed on the bottom (it’s hard to see from this picture, but it’s there):

Once the pilasters and crosspiece were installed, I was able to start laying tile (as you can see from the above picture). We first laid out the tile on the floor to choose the most pleasing pattern. Then I moved our pattern to the hearth and surround to make sure the spacing would work out. Finally, I marked and cut the custom-sized tile pieces, mixed up some mortar, and installed all the tile. I discovered that the thinset wasn't quite strong enough to hold the tiles still on the vertical surfaces, so I cut some scrap MDF to length to use as supports for the tile that was sliding down (you can see the MDF pieces in the above picture). I grouted everything, and the tile was good to go!

The reason for the tile needing to be installed at this point was because I had hardwood floors scheduled to be installed, and the tile had to be in place before that could happen. So I left the room looking like this, all ready for the floor installation:

Once the flooring was down, I resumed work on the shelf. For the top shelf, I first profiled the edges of a piece of pine that had been cut to extend beyond the pilasters just enough to look nice with the molding I chose. After attaching that board, I added some spacers cut from scrap pine on top of it, then nailed another two boards on top, the bottom one with profiled edges, and the top one with rounded edges. Attaching crown molding around the top gave me the final profile I wanted for the shelf. I then attached 3/4" pine + quarter round at the top and bottom of the pilasters, astragal for the bands around the pilasters, and base cap molding on the crosspiece. Sorry, no pictures of any of these steps. :(

A coat of primer on everything, then a couple of coats of Dunn-Edwards semi-gloss white, and here’s the finished product:

Full gallery is here: http://ericdennis.com/gallery/v/home2/projects/fireplace/