Have you ever thought that you’d love the comfiness and coziness of a fireplace mantle but maybe your house didn’t come with one? What do you do? You can take matters into your own hands and create a charming DIY mantle for yourself in no time. My husband and I didn’t have a mantle in this particular room so we DIY’d our own and it’s fabulous. If you want a mantle to call your very own, let’s look at how exactly you can make one yourself.
Getting the Mantle Base
This is what my space looked like pre mantle project in my finished basement in my previous home. I was, at this point, not sure what my decorating style would be, especially for this room.
That came a bit later.
To start it off, like many times, I decided to scour Facebook Marketplace for any mantles I could just buy and slap on my wall. Luckily, I did find a simple brown wood mantle base for around $20. Hurray!
After talking to my husband we decided we wanted to gather some extra materials to add onto it and make our DIY mantle a bit more spectacular.
Materials
It’s important to have a list of what you’ll need for your DIY project. Here was our list of things we needed before we started building:
- An extra board to go on top of the base of our mantle
- Screw gun
- Screws
- Paint
- Level
- Measuring tape
- Wood glue
- Paint brush
Getting Our DIY Mantle Measured
So now that we had what we needed to kick this project off, it was time to get started.
The first thing we did was measure, measure, and yep, measure again.
ALWAYS make sure you have the right measurements for everything whenever you are doing a Diy project.
Once we made sure to measure a million times, we threw the DIY mantle base up on the wall after drilling some anchors into the wall first for extra support.
It’s getting there! Yippee!
This makes me chuckle. I got really ahead of myself here and overly excited about the vision of this mantle that as soon as the base was up, I HAD to throw in some decorations to style it just to get the “idea”.
I knew that I definitely would use our small plug-in heater “fireplace” for ambiance.
Creating and Installing the Top Boards
My amazing hubby got to work creating the top portion of our mantle after he suggested we craft one to make it look a bit more “finished” and “classy”.
Once we was done we attached the top piece onto our mantle base and snapped this picture.
Progress!
Painting and Wallpaper Time
Even though our mantle was “crafted” it still needed some work to look the way we wanted it to look.
Once again I got ahead of myself and decorated our half completed mantle just to “see”.
I decided I’d paint the whole mantle itself all one color making it look more put together and not mismatched. I also knew I wanted to find some fun wallpaper to put on the wall just on the inside of the mantle to give it that something extra. Since this project there have been many more wallpaper projects.
I’m so glad I did!
The above photo is the exact wallpaper product I used to add that finishing touches to my DIY mantle.
I really liked this simple yet fun pattern because it would look cute no matter how many times I restyled it for different holidays and seasons.
Click Below to Shop!
The Finished Product
Once I painted the mantle and it dried over night, I added in the wallpaper and viola!
Okay, NOW was the time to officially decorate.
My favorite part.
Conclusion
Living back in our previous home, we LOVED our DIY mantle. Sadly, when we moved it stayed behind. But hopefully the new owners are loving it.
I hope that you can be confident to make your own mantle for your home to add some extra coziness and fun.
Just make sure to double check your measurements and be creative!
Share your own mantles in the comments that you’ve DIY’d or ask any questions and I’ll be happy to answer them!
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I love your DIY mantle. Great job!
Thank you! It was fun to make and I loved the end result.