Making the Fireplaces

The three fireplaces, two matching fireplaces in the living rooms and the kitchen fireplace, were constructed as separate complete units and then glued into place with household Goop. The frame for the fireplace was made from 1/4" white pine strips and the walls from 1/16" sheets of white pine. The black marble face was made from portions of discarded sheets of countertop material donated by a local kitchen remodeling firm. This material can easily be cut on the Jarmac table saw, then the edges sanded to a smooth finish and painted black using a simple permanent black maker pen. Again, household Goop was used to glue the simulated black marble facing onto the frame. The firebox, however, was made from bird's eye maple sheets cut to the correct size. The groves, simulating the bricks and grouting, were milled and the unit painted.

Click on photograph to enlarge

The method of making the bricks look old and  fire worn was accomplished by Eve who, after painting the bricks with black and gray water based paint,  took a very small amount of the grout between the stones in our house's foundation and ground it into a fine powder using a marble mortar and pistil usually used for grinding spices for cooking. The fine powder was then carefully glued into place using ordinary household glue. The overall effect worked quite well and was then repeated in all three fireboxes.

The "burn pattern" was copied from the fireplace we use most frequently.

Only two of the three fireplaces have been equipped with a small light allowing us to imitate burning coals. The fireplace in the east living room is on a panel that opens, disallowing it to be equipped with the necessary wiring to create this illusion.

Here you can see the kitchen fireplace in the very early stages of assembly. The mantle is not yet in place. But the picture shows the light socket in the firebox and also the stone hearth in place. In this case, the stone hearth is actually made from wood and painted to resemble stone. The interior has not as yet been painted to look fire worn.

Here is the same unit a little further along. Now the mantle is in place and the firebox walls have been painted to look used.

As you can see, looking through the door frames into other rooms, the miniature very closely resembled a real house being built as the process proceeded.
A better view shows the fireplace completed awaiting the actual "fire"  illusion. This is created by breaking glass beads of orange and red color and painting their rough edges with black acrylic paint, then gluing them together into a clump and setting that over a very small seed bulb set into the socket in the floor of the firebox.
Here is the fire illusion at work. It manages to look remarkably real, especially when twigs from real bushes are added, looking like 1/12 th scale logs.


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