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Last fall we started renovating our primary bedroom and bathroom which you can catch up with here and here. We always wanted a fireplace in our bedroom mainly for viewing the flame (vs. heat) because we like to sleep in a cold room. Our space is small, with only 4′ from the wall to the end of our bed, so I didn’t think it would be possible to fit one in our room, but Rich assured me he could find a slim fireplace and would build a very slim builtin to place it into. He ended up finding an electric fireplace that was only 5.5″ deep and 36″wide. He built out the frame to 6 1/4″ to leave room to plug in the cord.
He added some 2 x 4 studs so we had something supportive to drill the frame TV stand into.
We needed to have an electrical outlet moved to be able to plug in the fireplace below.
We decided to hide the components for the TV inside the wall. We would be able to access them by sliding the fireplace out (it is very easy to move). We wanted to put thin plywood over the entire unit, so we made a small opening to put our arm through and traced where the fireplace frame was behind it.
We used a drill to create a small hole in the corners and a jigsaw to cut out that rectangle that we traced.
We also cut a small rectangle on the top so we could feed the TV cord through.
We used sheetrock on the side since we had some leftover from the bathroom renovation and didn’t want to spend the money on another large piece of plywood since we only needed a narrow strip.
Now for the fun part, we play around with trim to see what looks good visually for framing it out. We started with the base. We were going for something simple, classic and elegant. Since it’s a tight space we didn’t want to go overboard with crown or trim.
We layered up the crown on top to balance the wide base on bottom.
We played around with the crown to see how much reveal we want to see of the trim below.
We used this crown from The Home Depot.
And this trim that we split to use as for the base and sides.
Next we built out the mantle, keeping it slim as well so it didn’t protrude to far into the room but also was in balance with the entire unit.
We are so happy with how it turned out and the scale feels right for the room. Now we just need to caulk, fill in the nail holes, prime and paint! Final room reveal will be coming soon!
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