Transformer Mantel

Our living room doesn’t really have any walls. The TV ended up being stuck in a corner, and then furniture had to just float around it, leaving a huge useless area in front of the staircase.

Where can furniture even go in this mess?

We have a gigantic fireplace, so ignoring it and basing furniture around a TV seems kinda rinky-dink. Luckily for us (sarcasm), a thief took off with our TV and solved that problem for a few months. We ended up getting a projector on Black Friday (cheaper than our old 42″!) that would work great in our crazy living room.

We got a pull-down screen from Amazon, and planned to mount it directly in front the fireplace. I wanted to hide the screen in the mantel. I don’t come up with ideas, I just shamelessly steal them. So, I googled like crazy to find a pretty one I could copy;  Problem is, there is no such thing in Google.

Luckily, Michael is super awesome, and he built one anyway.

How-to Build a Hidden Mantel Projector

This was our fireplace mantel before…

I didn’t mind the mantel. I did mind the huge TV cabinet shoved in a corner. We decided to make a white, generic-looking floating mantel out of molding like so:

I sent Michael some pictures like that, and shortly thereafter, he sends me 3-D CAD renderings of the plan. Man is crazy. Crazy Awesome.

The model was great because we were able to see the difference that design changes made before we started anything. We were fiddling with the top shelf overhang in this next image.

You can see how everything fits together in the cross-section.

One Lowe’s run later, we had an 8′ molding strip and a sheet of 1/2″ MDF. We had never used either of those things. We proceeded to rip/cut everything to size. This was easy for us since we had a drawing to get a cut list from, but a good hand-sketch would have worked just as well.

We were going to paint the mantel, so we went with MDF. PS – MDF is a messy beast.

Luckily, you can easily glue and clamp MDF to make it thicker (we stacked two sheets and sanded the edges flush to make the top more substantial).

 We used glue and a Kreg Pocket-hole driller to assemble the mantel. Worked like a charm.

This stuff is sawdust and glue, so we made sure not to clamp directly on it.

After building the box, we wrapped the frame in molding (first time for that, too). Molding is a pain. We went the hammer & finishing nail route, but an air nailer would have been perfect for this. We had to make shims with a paint stick and a belt sander to make a pretty miter joint on one side.

We caulked a few places, and then called it done. Done enough to hang, any way.

We took off the existing fireplace, and were left with this wood framing in our brick fireplace.  The backboard of the mantel was mounted directly to the wood, and the mantel is installed on top of that mounting board.

Below, you can see how the mantel holds the projector (basically like a paper towel roll) and how the mantel is connected to the back support board. The faint seam visible in the top left side is where the mantel sits on top of the back board.

Here is the projector screen tucked away…

After 3 coats of trim paint, we had a finished product. I read a suggestion online to use drywall mud on the end grain pieces to reduce the amount of paint it soaks up. I really should have listened to that suggestion.

Here is our transformer mantel in battle-form.

The amount of planning we did before starting helped us. We were able to make sure it would look okay, and we avoided buying too much or too little material. Things didn’t work out exactly like the model, but it definitely helped.

Time:

• About 15 total hours between the two of us.

Cost:

• 8′ Molding $18.19
• 1/2″ MDF sheet $26.42
• Hardware $3.95
• Paint: Already Had
• Total: $48.56

We sold our old mantel on Craigslist for $40. Not too shabby for a $9 upgrade!