Custom Fireplace Surround

My wife and I have been gradually renovating our house. One of our bigger projects was to renovate the fireplace. When we bought the house, the fireplace had an ornate hood mounted over it which was very dated. I removed the hood, and along with the other renovations to the fireplace and surrounding walls (adding tile, painting the walls and installing wall frames), I designed and built a custom surround, using a neighbor’s Federal-style surround for inspiration.

Here’s a ‘before’ picture:

I drew the entire project out on graph paper beforehand to get the measurements right. Once I had my plan, I gathered materials: pine and MDF boards were pretty much all I needed.

I used pine for the front of the pilasters and MDF for the sides. I cut everything to size and routed the flutes and inset on the front pieces:

I then assembled the pilasters using biscuit joinery, installed the moldings in the insets, and attached them to the wall using my nail gun:

The crosspiece was simple enough: pine front and MDF sides, with a simple profile routed on the bottom (it’s hard to see from this picture, but it’s there):

Here’s a ‘during’ picture, taken after the pilasters and crosspiece were up and after the tile had been installed. I took a break at this point so that the hardwood floors could be laid in the room:

For the top shelf, I first profiled the edges of a piece of pine that had been cut to extend beyond the pilasters just enough to look nice with the molding I chose. After attaching that board, I added some spacers cut from scrap pine on top of it, then nailed another two boards on top, the bottom one with profiled edges, and the top one with rounded edges. Attaching crown molding around the top gave me the final profile I wanted for the shelf. I then attached 3/4” pine + quarter round at the top and bottom of the pilasters, astragal for the bands around the pilasters, and base cap molding on the crosspiece. Sorry, no pictures of any of these steps. :(

Prime everything, then a couple of coats of Dunn-Edwards semi-gloss white, and here’s the finished product:

In those pictures you can see some bits of the baseboards, wall frames and built-up chair rail that I installed, but that’s another project. :)