Living Room: Mantel {Settled In September}

When working on the “collage wall” from yesterday, I decided I needed some other items to break up the crazy amount of frames/pictures as well as to display other items in a different way.

Today's project came about because I chose not to use this mirror from our bedroom set a while back. I was monstrous and I was afraid my growing littles were somehow going to knock off this thing and get smashed. {lil dramatic…I know} Really, it just kinda dated the furniture.

This mantel started as a, "what in the world can we use this ugly mirror that we're never going to use again" project.

I also recently bought a dresser for more storage and it came with a similar mirror piece on top. With these bad boys stacking up, I figured I should find something to do with them. Other than removing and framing the huge mirrors, I had to get real creative…AND get the hubs involved.

I intended on chopping off the bottom and top off these mirror/shelf pieces after removing the actual mirrors. After talking through it with my hubby I suggested we try prying trim pieces off the top so we could save the other parts {in tacked} for another project 😉 When those came off easy enough he decided to try tapping off the bottom part as well.
After removing the pieces I wanted, I went to town spray painting a couple coats of white on the trim while Matt hunted down some wire cutters to get rid of the jaunting nails protruding what will now be the top of the mantel.
{Here's what that looked like: Matt, with wire cutters in hand & wood on kitchen counter. Locates his nail of chose, places wire cutters around said nail, grips with both hands, turns head to the side, closes eyes tightly, snaps off nail only to hear it flying across the kitchen. Locate next nail and repeat.}
After all the nails were removed I took that big piece out and gave it a couple quick coats of paint.
When they were all dry, Matt used our friends nail gun to assemble the pieces, placing the trim pieces off what used to be the bottom of the mirror that would have sat flush on top of the dresser.
With these parts now together well, trim hanging downward to make the appearance of a thick mantel, I used wood puddy in the nail holes, giant holes where the weird decorative parts used to be, as well as the tiny joints between the boards. NORMALLY I'm a that's-good-enough kinda girl but since I had the puddy already from having to fill the gunshot holes in Big Betsy, I figured it would make this look that much more quality.
The puddy dried for about 30 minutes, I sanded it lightly and wiped it down before taking it back outside for the last 3 coats of white spray paint.

Now...how to hang it on the wall...

My hubs and his buddy took a while discussing what would be the best way to hang this on the wall. We didn't need something Huge but also didn't want it falling off the wall if we placed things actually on the mantel. lol
The final decision? We went retro, old school floating shelves were hung int his manor- building a box that would be mounted to the wall in which the mantel would slide over and then be nailed to.
For my mantel, they made the frame 3 foot by 7 inches. This would insure that we could screw the frame into at least 2 studs assuring a maximum hold.
My hubs screw the box frame onto the wall into 2 studs.
We then used a nail-gun to mount the faux mantel to the frame.
Now we are continually praying it doesn't fall off the wall in the middle of the night causing bed urination or unexpected heart attacks.