My Living Room Project

I’ve started a new home project.

Our living room is a fairly large room that contains a floor to ceiling brick (gas log) fireplace that’s looking a bit dated. The fireplace is the standard fare, a brick column with a raised hearth, a mantle shelf and the obligatory metal fire screen and tools.

There are oak book shelves/cabinets built-in to alcoves on either side of the fireplace which extends about two feet beyond them into the room. The fireplace column is a little over five feet wide.

In addition to the fireplace looking dated the arrangement of the fireplace on one end of the room and the only hookup and currently logical place for a flat panel TV on the opposite wall makes arranging furniture for these two opposite focal points difficult.

My goal is to update the look of the fireplace and create one focal point for the room. Here’s how I’m planning to accomplish this:

• replace the fire screen/tools with a new black glass door enclosure for the firebox;
• replacing the dated mantle shelf with a custom built modern wrap around oak mantle that breaks the vertical line of the fireplace and ties in the two custom built-in book-shelves;
• move the flat panel TV to above the fireplace on a tilt/swing-out mount.
• place the electronic components (cable DVR, AV Receiver, etc.) in one of the bookshelves with cable runs to the TV hidden inside the new wrap-around mantle; and
• rewire the cable, electrical and speaker systems to fit the new location of the components and TV.

I’m building the new mantle and will be doing all the mounting/moving/rewiring work myself. The part I’m dreading the most is crawling under the house to pull all the new cable and wire.

Updates and photos to be posted later.

Note: Of course with age and experience comes wisdom. A project such as this always opens the door for other follow-on projects. I can see perhaps painting and some new living room furniture and lots of rearranging somewhere in my future. ;-)