Ever since we moved in 3 years ago this room has been relatively empty. We never knew what to do with it - it was an office, it was a living room, a studio (I'm a photographer), a dining room and a playroom. Nothing stuck. We have 2 living rooms already - one upstairs for the kidlets and one downstairs for us and company. What to do?
Here's the room - empty. You can see that I let my girls use the walls as a chalkboard because, why not? This is the very first room you see when you enter our home. We clearly wanted to make the statement of "romper room" - I think we succeeded!
The room itself is about 15' wide by 13' deep. It's not a bad size and it has these awesome windows that look out onto the front porch. (the history behind these is that the windows were designed to go to the floor because 150 years ago homes were taxed based on how many doors they had. So people in this town put floor to ceiling windows to act as doorways to avoid taxation.)
Good bones, but what to do with it? I initially considered a library, but I'm a Kindle convert, so I really don't have all that many books any more. :( I thought of something cozy like a gathering room with 4 club chairs and a table, etc but then I realized that it's not our style. We're not "smoking room" kind of people. We like to lounge with our feet up and relax and drink wine and have conversations about nothing.
Honestly, I was out of options until I saw this:
It's from a beautiful home decorating blog called Nest of Bliss and it was exactly what I needed to see at that time. This house is an OLD victorian. But for whatever reason after multiple changes and renovations, there are no remaining fireplaces in this entire house. I am so sad about that because I love a good fireplace. Not because I want to burn wood or even like gas fireplaces, but because I love CANDLES in fireplaces. So, an idea was born.
This room was to become a sitting area/quaint living room to the adjacent room which was to become my home office. Ta-Da!!! Plan in motion.
Next problem: I wanted to do it on the cheap. It was right after Christmas, we were broke and honestly I didn't want to spend a fortune on a room that I was just filling to fill. The most expensive part of building this faux fireplace I had in my mind was that bottom box. It was going to take about $150 in wood just to make the bottom. And so the wheels were turning. I wanted a fireplace that was a tiny bit ornate - but I couldn't MAKE ornate with limited funds. So, I sat on it.
And then one day, I was cleaning my house and I had one of those "aha" moments when I saw this:
It's an armoire. It was in our living room and it was housing Legos. I was tired of this whole look and so after a careful photoshop job, I decided that this would be the perfect base to my new faux fireplace. And it was FREE.
I took the gorgeous fireplace from above and meshed it a little with my armoire - knowing that it would be painted white just to see how it "might" look. And while this is seriously a kindergarten mockup, I was in love and Knew where this was headed.
I am going to write about how we actually DID this in another post, but for now, I'll show the after:
It's ornate and pretty and the drawer on the bottom still functions as storage! There is about 18" of space above the candles for the heat to dissipate, so there is no risk of fire, however I am going to line the inside box with white sheet metal just in case.
My heart is swooning... This only took us ONE day to build and another couple to paint. After that, the room came together like a dream using stuff we already had and a coffee table hack from IKEA. To flank the sides of this fireplace, I built two simple console tables from stair treads and threaded rod - super simple and that tutorial will be in another post.
The before, one more time:
And the after:
Sigh... Don't you just want to sink in?
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