The Legend of Frankenmantle: How John the Carpenter Saved Christmas

I realized that in yesterday's post I mentioned the Frankenmantle without explanation.  Forgive me.  Today I will regale you with the story of how Frankenmantle came to exist.

It will be much more entertaining with visuals:

BEFORE:  moving day.  Gotta love the pinksplosion.

I will point out the not so obvious flaws in the mantle that we bought along with the house.  

-it is mounted about 4" too high on the fireplace, making the gap between the top of the opening and bottom of the mantle awkwardly sized.

-it is about 2" too small on either side, making the side to side appearance also very awkward.

-it is very ugly.

So the tale begins...  

...we lived with it and exorcised the pink from the living room, wallpaper from the hallway, bizarre brass carriage lights from the fireplace and hideous pink backgrounds in the built-ins flanking the fireplace.  Yet we still didn't like the mantle.  It was just not a good fit for us and the house.  So onto craigslist it went...

DURING:  picture from the craigslist ad and our new, but long-term temporary lights.  

 ...and miracle of miracles, someone wanted to buy it for their house.  They showed us pictures of the room it was going to and it was a much better fit.  I hope it is happy and I wish it nothing but the best and hope it enjoys its new life.

Now we were left with 3 sad bolts sticking out of the fireplace and nothing to attach our Christmas stockings to.  Oops.  Here is where our hero John the Carpenter enters the story.  

I went to pick up Will from school and when I came back we had welcomed Frankenmantle into our home.  Behold...

AFTER:  Awww. In process of being Christmasized

AFTER:  Now there is a place for stockings :)
Christmas is saved.

Here is how it went down.  We had the paneled piece left over from the powder room vanity project

See it there?
Notice we had lovely brass carriage lights in there as well.

In an incredible flurry of awesomeness which took place in the 20 minutes it took to get Will from school - John the Carpenter achieved legendary status by:

1.  bolting the leftover piece from the vanity to the wall

2.  finding and then attaching a random shelf that we had moved from 2 different places to the top (we used the top of the vanity piece above as the backsplash for the new! improved!! vanity in the powder room)

3.  cutting and staining a piece along the side that he needed to add to balance the visual

AND

4.  beginning to decorate it with Christmas decorations

The Legend of Frankenmantle:  How John the Carpenter saved Christmas.

A new holiday classic.

Boom! Something got done!!

You know it.  Mark the date.  We have a finished project.  By finished I mean that we don't need to touch up paint, caulk, buy a new toilet, etc..  I mean it is done enough that I don't feel like it's missing something and I can move forward until it drives me crazy again and I do something else to it.

Here is a before:

Moving day.

Ok, so it's a smallish project.  On moving day the plan was to make this cabinet in the living room a bar area.  I thought of a mirrored background to add light to the corner and sex it up a little.  So Exactly 4 months after moving here, it is done.  But when I look at this picture I notice some other things that we've done in between:

-pink carpet - gone
-wallpaper in hallway (you can see it above the cabinet) - gone
-brass carriage light on fireplace - gone
-the mantle that was too small and mounted too high on the fireplace - gone

Wow.  Just look at this.  The pink background inside the cabinets was exponentially more hideous in person.  I believe it actually clashed with the pink carpet.  In fact, it was not even a week into living here that John and I freaked out late one Saturday night and broke out primer and painted over it so we didn't have to look at the PINK! anymore.  We literally got up from a football party coma and started painting at 11PM.  All the pink made the fireplace brick read pink as well, it wasn't until the new carpet that we realized that the brick has more brown than pink.  But no longer my friends - the pink is officially all gone.  Yay!

Behold the after:

Hard to tell how cool it is, but trust - it's cool.

Sexy, right??

OK, I got a few more things on the agenda for this area (but I'm calling it done - for now).  The mantle clock will return to the mantle when we build a more permanent one.  The frankenmantle John made on the fly is awesome in it's own right, but not quite what we have in mind for the long term and definitely not sturdy enough to support the weight of the mantle clock.  Basically we needed somewhere to put the Christmas stockings....

So snaps to the Christensens.  I'll post better pictures when we get some sun around here and take down Christmas decorations.  It'll look like a proper bar then, I swear :)