I picked up this wood mantel down the road at a yard sale a good six years ago for $45.00. I adore the elderly couple who I bought it from and enjoy knowing that this was in their home as well.
We took out our cast iron wood burning stove, since I have allergies and found the wood to be messy and hard to restock and replaced it with a gas burning remote fireplace- now were talking!
Once the fireplace was installed, we started to add the buy-on’s like a stone background, fake logs, etc. It took us a while to figure out how to incorporate the wood mantel since we had a larger opening…with some additional building, painting and molding we were able to ‘fake’ our professional looking fireplace.
I wanted a light colored mantel but didn’t want it to be flat, so found this texture paint by Valspar, called Tuscan Accents.
As you can see we had a lot going on here. To unify everything I went with neutral color paints.
First coat came out smooth and creamy in color.
I also brought the brush they suggested to use, which was basically a long bristle brush.
The second coat is where the texture gets added. You must make sure to get this into all your nooks so that you will have an even looking project. As you can the paint has these bits that you have to flatten out with a plastic or metal tool. I used the same tool that I use to remove the excess putty from a hole that I’m filling in. I did this step in stages as you want to flatten bits before they dry, so take your time. Once you get the texture that you desire, then your job is finished. It is a very simple DYI project.
You can see that the Tuscan texture is very light, but gives good depth to the appearance of my mantel.
We painted our other accessories a similar color, but there isn’t any texture to the finish.
We have a light marble tile that completed our entire look.
The tile on top gives our mantel a lot of natural color and texture. I have some panels high above that have a similar texture and coloring of our mantel.
