The Mantle

Ever since we first moved into our house, possibly even before, Paige has wanted a mantle to hang the Christmas stockings on during the holiday season. I guess she doesn't just want the mantle for the purpose of hanging stockings, but for adding some pizazz to the fireplace that currently is just a mass of ugly bricks. So I decided to set about doing something about in time for stocking hanging season.




The Wood

My Dad recently came into a mess of Teak from a dock worker that scavenged the support packaging that encased a sail boat shipped from South East Asia back in the 1970s. My Dad is a woodworker, but more importantly in this case a wood collector. He has wood stored in 16 cities, 7 counties, 4 states, and 2 countries, and that is just the wood he has scavenged, bought, begged, swindled, and poached in the last month. Some people would say that he has wood issues, but when I benefit from it, I won't complain. Dad had the teak milled up into a variety of sizes, but there were some real beauties that were 3" x 10" x 8'--perfect size for a mantle. This would have been the easy choice, because very minimal work would be required to have a finished product, but that piece of wood has a market value of about $600 USD.


The cheaper option, as far as hard dollar value for the wood (not necessarily labor), was to veneer mdf that was cut to the dimensions we wanted. As you probably guessed, my father has a large selection of veneers. Paige and I decided on some highly figured Santos Rosewood (Genus: Machaerium; Species: scleroxylon).


The Process

The initial plan was to spend a solid day down at my parents' house and get the mantle done--all in one day. Since both my Dad and I had Veteran's day off, we determined that this would be an ideal day to spend building a mantle. We got off to an early start and we had the mdf cut and glued in virtually no time at all. After lunch down at the local roach coach, we began gluing up surfaces and laying down the veneer.


The veneer didn't lay down as easily as we had hoped, and we attributed this to the fact that we were working outside (under cover) and it was raining heavily. All of that is just to say it was quite humid and the glue wouldn't dry. It took another long evening of my Dad and I working on it, and an additional 5-6 hours of my Dad's time putting on the final touches.


The Hanging

We had my parents up for dinner on December 4th, and after dinner my Dad and I hung the mantle. We used a cabinet hanger to attach the mantle, and it went up with relatively little effort.


Dinner consisted of Moroccan shrimp on crostini, grilled rack of lamb, Parmesan mashed potatoes, Campo Viejo Gran Reserva 2000, green salad with fresh croutons, Ethiopian Misty Valley coffee, chocolate crinkles, and peanut butter oatmeal cookies.