DIY Shiplap Fireplace Project

This post includes the reveal of our fireplace, inspiration for this project, our project plan, a tutorial, a budget breakdown, and a complete source list.

I have been looking for a tv stand or console table for our living room for two years now and I could not find one that I actually loved. On top of that, my husband and I were always talking about how we wish we had a fireplace. Netflix's "fireplace for your home" on our TV screen just wasn't cutting it anymore.

Well, we finally found a solution. I was first inspired by Chris and Julia when they installed a new fireplace in their master bedroom IN ONE WEEKEND! and then I saw this fireplace from The Blooming Nest while scrolling through Instagram, and I knew that was exactly what we wanted. She has a really great tutorial that we followed pretty closely with some differences I will mention in this post + what we wish we did differently.

BEFORE

This room has just been hard to figure out from day one. This wall was so large and we knew we didn't want a huge bulky tv console to fill it, but we didn't have a better solution. So we went for about two years with our tv on a plastic storage container.

AFTER

The entire room still has some work to be done, but we'll get to that later...

Inspiration Board

Project Plans

Materials List

2×4’s (used for framing)
1×4’s (used for studs)
Fireplace Insert
Shiplap
Lattice Trim (used for corner trim)
1×6 (used for bottom trim)
1x8 (used for mantel)
Caulk and paint – we painted our shiplap with Sherwin Williams Extra White
Wood Veneer
Wood Stain

The quantity of each item will depend on how large you are building your fireplace.

Our living room wall is 15 ft wide and 9 ft tall
Our fireplace wall is a little over 5 ft wide and 1 foot deep
4 ft from floor to bottom of the mantel
16″ from the bottom of fireplace insert to floor
We bought the 40″ fireplace insert
50″ Samsung QLED TV

Tools we used – a miter saw, table saw, level, Kreg jig, impact driver, brad nailer, and drill.

Tutorial

1) We measured our wall and created a plan. Some things to consider are, how large is your tv? How large is the wall you are working with? What size fireplace insert to you want to buy? What size mantel do you want?

2) Then we taped it out on the wall. We did this so we could see the size and placement and decide whether we liked it.

3) We placed 1x4's horizontally and drilled them to the studs in the wall. These will act as studs for our frame to be anchored to. We marked with a pencil where the studs should be and made sure to pre-drill so the wood didn’t split.

4) We built the frame on the floor and lifted it when finished. (We used a Kreg jig to make pocket holes to drill into to make the structure more secure, but you can simply use a nail gun or drill.)

We built the entire frame and then lifted it up to the wall, however in order to get everything straight I had to lean on one side with all my weight while Ryon drilled. Looking back we would have built the two side walls first and attached them to the wall/studs and then built the front and attached it, so that drilling it into the studs so that is was straight was not so complicated. The other problem we ran into later was when we put the fireplace insert in, it barely didn't fit because of these two rubber feet at the bottom. Make sure to take that into account when building your wall. I would say order the fireplace and measure it exactly before building the square that your fireplace will be in.

5) Once the structure was attached to the wall, Ryon glued some extra wood to the top to fill in the space between the structure and the ceiling.

Then we installed the fireplace insert to make sure it fit before moving forward. We screwed it in temporarily because in order to get the shiplap behind it we needed to unscrew it and pull it out a little bit.

6) From this point, Ryon built a shelf near the top of the fireplace where the hole for the tv plugs would go. The shelf will hold our router, and modem as well as the extension cord plug that we have our fireplace, smart tv, router, and modem all plugged into. I failed to get a good picture of the shelf, but if you look really closely at the picture below you might be able to spot the shelf where the shiplap stops.

7) We installed the shiplap. We started at the top and went down from there. We make sure to leave a hole where our tv plug will go in.

8) After all the shiplap was installed, we added trim, baseboard, and filled in nail holes. I then painted the fireplace to match the trim throughout the rest of our house. Sherwin Williams Extra White

9) Our last step was to build and install the mantel. We used this tutorial to build the mantel and used some pre-stain and Dark Walnut by Minwax for the stain. We screwed 1 small 2×4 into the studs, making sure it was level and then we placed the mantel on top and nailed down into the studs. And ta-dah! It's finished!

Budget Breakdown

Shiplap We bought 19 boards at $5.23 per board, but half of the boards we found had a little bit of water damage that really only affected the look of the shiplap. We knew we would be painting over it so we grabbed those ones and asked for a discount. They gave us half off, so we ended up only spending about $65 on the shiplap, but for the sake of the budget breakdown, I used the regular total before the discount.

40" Fireplace Insert we bought on sale for $316, however it may not currently be that same price.

1×6's We already had the bottom trim molding because we have plans to redo the trim on the entire house. We bought these at a local company called FJP Supply Company.

There were a couple of other materials that we used for this project that we already had laying around the house, (caulk, paint, wood stain, pre-stain, stain brush, nails, screws, etc.) therefore I did not include them in the budget.

As you can tell I loaded this post with information, but if there is anything you still have questions about the project, feel free to ask!