How to Build a Floating Mantel | Fireplace Wooden Mantel DIY

Hi everybody, it's Melissa from Welcome to the Woods. Today I'm going to show you how I made a very easy mantle. This process could also be used for a shell. This is a floating style so the majority of the structure is on the inside of what I'm building. These 2x4s create the structure that will make my mantle shell very strong. You can see that I pre-drilled some holes to sink my screws down into and I am just attaching shorter 2x4s to a long 2x4. The shorter 2x4s are cut to a little more than 3 inches. I basically just took the measurement of the inside of the box that I'm going to create to slip over this structure. This floating mantle is for my newly finished fireplace. Because I used drywall for underneath my faux concrete finish, I can easily just use screws, regular screws, that are long enough to go through my 2x4 support, through my half-inch drywall, and at least an inch into my studs that I used to create the concrete surround. Here you can see I put one screw in in the middle, lined up with where the studs are in the surround, and I'm just finding level before I place my other two screws in two other studs. Don't even ask me why I don't have a 4-foot level yet, I need to buy one ASAP. But I'm just using this little guy for now. For the box that I'm going to slide around my support system, I'm building with pine. This is 1x6 pine and I mitered all of the edges and all of the sides of this so that everything would fit together and create a seamless look, like one big piece of wood. So here you can see I'm adding wood glue on both seams, and I have a mechanism set up where I'm going to try and clamp this together, but I would not recommend doing it this way. It was not very easy for me to get a tight fit, and if I were to do this project again, I'd create my box with either packaging tape or painter's tape on each of the seams to pull it tight and get everything lined up where I want it to be. One way that I was able to stabilize the box for the mantle while I clamped against and held that glue joint tight is by just cutting scrap pieces of wood that fit perfectly to the inside square. So you can see that I'm doing the same thing with glue on the ends that I made. These are squares that I mitered all the sides and I'm just nailing them into place as well. Everywhere that I put wood glue I nailed, but I made sure that I didn't have any of my finished nails visible on the front face of the mantle just to give it a really nice clean look. The top and bottom are actually made with standard pine and the front piece I purchased quality pine. One trick that I heard about that helps get your mitered corners really tight is to sand your pine boards or whatever wood you're using and then take the shank of a screwdriver and run it down across the mitered joint. This kind of smashes the wood together almost at a 45 degree angle and it makes the mitered seam disappear. Then you go over the sander again on both flat surfaces to bring it back to a 90 degree angle edge. So this worked for me somewhat, but I had already filled in some imperfections with wood putty and the wood putty really got in the way. So if you're going to do this trick do it right after you attach your boards together before you fill in imperfections with wood putty. Of course the entire thing got sanded starting with a 120 grit going up to a 320 grit and then I decided to finish with a wood conditioner and a stain. The stain I used is sort of a white washing. It's pickled oak by Minwax and this stain is not going to change the color of pine much, but what it will do is knock off those yellow undertones that are so prevalent and make it more of a neutral color wood. After two coats of my stain I chose to finish with a wax or a hand rubbed luster. This is a very light finish. This is not something that would protect if this was like a table top or whatever you're working on, but for a shelf and mantel where you're just setting things on top of it I feel like wax is a great choice. So you apply that with a circular rubbing motion and after 15 minutes you buff it out. Once I got the box up on top of my supports it didn't move around a ton. I just centered it and shot a couple brad nails down into the 2x4 so it wouldn't move around. Overall gravity is holding the mantel onto the supports and the supports create a lot of strength for this. Even though it looks floating it's still going to work beautifully to place any kind of decorations you might want on top. So the very next thing I did is I totally decked out my fireplace for Christmas. I hung stockings and I put this beautiful frosted garland that I've had for a couple years on top of my new mantel. I hope you guys love it as much as I do and if you're impressed don't forget to comment below and let me know or share this video with your friends. Thank you so much for watching we'll catch you again next time on Welcome to the Woods.