Refinished Fireplace

Back in 2004, I bought an electric fireplace off of Craig's List. It was in a newly remodeled home and the guy hated it. The builder made the mantle to fit around an old chimney stack. It was a beautiful mantle with lots of detail made out of solid oak. There was dental moulding and fluted molding. But like the guy who sold it, I hate new oak. It's so bright. And for some reason people love to put a gloss varnish on new oak so it's always ridiculously shiny.

Here's the Craig's List image:

I had to trim off the sides to put in my condo.

The new oak made the piece seem huge, so I stained it with blue wash stain. I claimed it took up too much visual space in that golden oak color.

And it was like that for 9 years. Then the other day, I looked at it and decided to remove the wash and put on some American Walnut stain, I like to think of it as an antique oak color since it's the color oak turns after 50 or so years. I have a ton of old oak in my house so I thought it was time to get it to look like all the other pieces in my house.

For $30, I bought some stripper, steel wool, steel brushes, gloves and stain and went to work.

Here's what it looks like in progress. Since the mantle and fireplace were grouted to the stand I made for it out of MDF, I decided to do the job in my house (all windows open of course). It would have been better to do it outside. Since the blue wash was a stain, it wasn't hard to get it off. And as a bonus, it left the wood a little grayish (which means it looked aged). And I didn't have to work so hard to get it all off, because I wasn't looking for bright new wood.

When I stained it blue, I thought I would always keep it that way because I knew the dental moulding would be hard to strip. And it was the hardest part of the whole job. But the steel brush made it much more manageable. I highly recommend the steel brush. It was a life saver for this job.

And here it is in it's new color.

I think it does take up more visual space in the wood tone, but now it matches all the old oak I have collected over the years and it's looks like it belongs.