Simple cherry firplace surround (build thread)

[Frank Pellow]

December 9th 2012:

This week, I started making my daughter Kristel’s Christmas present.  I am working without any plans and designing “on the fly”.  When I started all I knew was that the gift was going to be a surround and a mantel for this fireplace in her basement recreation room:

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and that it was going to be made from this cherry that has been acclimatizing in my woodworking shed for a couple of weeks.  I did take measurements of the fireplace the last time that I visited Ottawa.  

My first decision was that the surround would consist of matching shelves on each side extending higher than fireplace itself, that the mantel would be a board resting on the shelves and extending out a little bit both on the front and sides.  The brass strips and some of the black metal at the top will be hidden.

All that decided, it was time to prepare the cherry.  

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The boards are of inferior quality  [unsure] which means that there is a lot of waste that goes into my woodstove.  I acquired about 300 bf of it four years ago and it has been in storage in my garage since then.  The wood didn’t cost me a lot but I wish I had not purchased it.  [embarassed]  I have used some of the cherry on other items and after this project will have about 100 bf left.  I’ve learned to avoid such bargains.  

The first step in preparing each boards is to roughly joint a straight edge using a Festool track saw:
   
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I then face planed each board using the jointer/planer mode of my new Hammer combo machine for the first time:

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I thank Rod Sheridan  [thumbs up]  for coming over Monday evening and helping me set everything up accurately.  The combo machine is great but the user manual is the normal brief European type which is sadly lacking in usability.  I had previously struggled with the manual for about three hours trying to figure just how to convert from a “thicknesseser” to a “jointer-planer” without disturbing any important factory settings.  Rod got everything humming along in about an hour.  Now I can switch modes in about a minute.

Here is a photo of the cherry jointed, planed, and marked for thickness:

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I next built the two sets of shelves.  With all that is going on in my shed at the moment, I had to utilize the top o f my table saw to sand the pieces prior to assembly.  The surfaces that will be on the self interiors was sanded up to 220 grit:

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Simple dado and rabbet joints with glue only were used when assembling the shelves.  After assembly I inserted two Miller dowels into both the top and bottom horizontal pieces:

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Now I can get a better idea of how all this will fit together and what other parts need to be made (or purchased):

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Here, some narrow boards are being re-sawn for use in thin panels on the backs of the shelves:

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[Frank Pellow]

December 16th 2012:

I made some progress on the fireplace surround this week.  The narrow boards that were re-sawn last week were glued together then planed and sanded to make backing panels.  These backing panels were simply screwed to the shelves:

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As I said, earlier, the cherry boards are not as good as one would wish them to be and they contain several knot holes.  I the knot holes with a mixture of epoxy and walnut sawdust.

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Once sanded and finished, the repaired knots look OK.

I made 15 centimetre high plinths for each set of shelves.  Here one such plinth is being glued to its shelf-set:

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[Frank Pellow]

December 22 2012:

The fireplace surround project advanced to the stage where I could wrap a part of it to place under Kristel’s tree.  

I purchased a couple of different types of cherry trim to go around the edges of the mantel.  They were applied using glue and Miller dowels.  In this photo, the trim has been applied and the mantel is being sanded with two different Festool sander as well as being hand sanding with Granat pads of various grits:

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It’s always a joy to use my Festool jig saw with a scroll blade.  I can always really on the cut, be it straight or curved to be dead accurate:

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The part that Kristel received was one of the shelf-sets first sanded up t0 220 grit and then finished with three coats of polymerized tung oil.  In this photo, I am starting to apply tung oil sealer to the shelves:

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And, in the photos below, the shelves are being “wrapped” for transport and presentation:

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I enclosed a note explaining that the shelves were part of something bigger and enclosing these to mock-up photos:

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Friday afternoon, I made the 5 hour drive to Ottawa to deliver this and other gifts and to have a brief visit with Kristel and with my granddaughters Leah, Brook, and Jamie.  There were lots of guesses about what the package might contain, but none were close.  I returned to Toronto Saturday morning.  In January, I will go there for a longer visit and install the surround.

 

[nclemmons]

Lucky daughter and grand daughters, Frank -

And lucky you!

Surround looks nice and useful for storage as well -

neil