DIY FIREPLACE TRANSFORMATION with a CUSTOM HEARTH!

hey gang it's paul setback welcome back to our channel we need to have a talk gang we got to talk about that fireplace sitting in your living room right now it's red brick a stained mantel and look let's face it that's from the early 80s you've done all this beautiful work on your home you've redone the floors the walls you've probably even scrape the popcorn off your ceiling but you still have that red brick as an eyesore right in the middle of your living room and we're going to show you how we transform this thing with some ledger stone and fortunately for you and for us it's a pretty straightforward project something you can easily tackle in a weekend and it's relatively inexpensive there are a lot of great videos on youtube on how to update fireplaces but this one has a lot of unique challenges for us check it out we have this vaulted ceiling right here so on this side on the right hand side there's about eight foot height and over here it's over 10 foot height so that means that top area right there those top ledger stones are going to have a compound angle to fit tight against the ceiling then we have this inside corner this brick right here how are we going to handle that and check out this hearth gang is it a simple rectangle of course not look at the shape of that thing that's going to be a pretty complicated piece to fit but we're going to show you how we make it beautiful so when santa claus comes down the chimney this christmas he can sit on that nice hearth have his cookies eat his milk and get on his way but enough talking about this fireplace let's get started the first step is to remove this mantel because we want to put the leather stone behind it and we're going to repurpose this game without the brackets i don't think they're doing much anyway check that out and i'm not even sure how it's attached so let me get the crowbar back there and see if i get this thing off the wall without damaging it all right guys we're about to get this mantle off the wall let me take you in close and show you what they did this piece of wood right here was laid as they were laying the brick it gave them a nailer on the brick for the mantel now when we're pulling it out it's coming out also so we're just going to keep working it out of the wall and take the whole thing out as one unit and see we're up against [Music] all right guys check it out here's what they did this board right here was installed by the masons and it acts as a nailer so when the finished carpenters brought the mantle they attached a cleat to the nailer with some framing nails slid the mantel over that cleat and then attached it right here with some finishing nails it's just attached with like three framing nails so i'm gonna cut them i would use my bow saw but this is one of those days where i think i got tools scattered from bourbon street to whiskey bay so we're gonna do it by hand with a little jab saw [Music] all right you saw us get the mantel off the wall check it out we cut this first nail once i did that the other started loosened pretty good so we're able to pull it off the wall and now you can really get an idea of how they built the thing here's the cleat they nail to that nailer and they fasten the mantel to that cleat and check this out i wasn't sure how they made it but now you get a pretty good idea how they built that and who knows they could have even done that on site let's go back over here to the fireplace and look at that nailer it pulled out of the wall a little bit and i think the best place for it is right back in the wall so let's see if it'll pound back in there nice now that the mantel is down let's talk about this brick right here now if you wanted to you can buy pre-manufactured corners and put them right there cut it where you need to but it's kind of jagged it might look good in some homes but in this house i wanted a nice straight cut so we're not going to use these outside corners so instead of doing all that we're going to make a cut in our face stone right here and we're just going to spray paint this black we've already got it taped off and i have some of this black high temp paint left over from another job we're simply going to spray that and we're almost ready to lay some stone [Music] all right one coat of black paint right there and it's gonna look fine guys if you don't like that look you can just put some stone there this is what we're gonna do we've done it before it looks fantastic we're about ready to start laying some stone where is my first course gonna be since i don't have my heart yet i'm gonna start actually right here and that's gonna give me a full course of stone above the firebox opening i had a piece of smart siding from lp left over from a job i made a nice straight cut on my table saw right there and that's going to act as a ledger you can see the laser's already set up we're going to mount this level on the laser beam we're going to mount our first course right here and the ledger will hold it perfectly level until the thin set dries so let's put up this board and go outside and mix up some thinset [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay gang that needs to slake for five minutes so while it's slaking let's go back inside i want to show you a little detail i did way back when we were running the trim that's gonna make this job today a lot easier this one by three was always there covering the transition between the drywall and the brick but i knew it would be difficult to get our ledger stone against that one by three because it's at a 45 degree angle so about a month ago i went to my trim shop and i got a piece of five quarter and i made a piece of chamfer strip you can buy chamfer strip at the home centers but it's much smaller than this and it's usually not finished grade like i said this was some five quarter stock just rip it on my table saw and i applied it to the one by three like that that piece is right here caulked it painted it and now we have a nice square edge perfectly level all the way up for our stone to die into it's gonna look great let's go back outside and see if our thinset has finished leaking quick tip gang get you a bucket and a sponge and get the brick wet so it doesn't suck all the moisture out of your thin set [Music] all right guys we've got our first three courses up it's going really fast and you can see how nice it's working right here against the champer strip we're gonna have a nice clean corner so just a few tips we're doing we wanted to show you these are glued together from the factory and that glue gets in these corners and you can see some right there squeezing out can you get that jordan that's going to mess up your joints so the first thing we do we go around and we cut all that off first every piece every piece gets inspected these nice tight joints that little bit of glue drag you crazy and we are back buttering and as you can see we got our laser beam set up we've done this before without checking it with the laser and we found that there was a cumulative air in the stone in other words it's not perfectly parallel it's not perfectly straight from the factory because hey it's basically a rock right yeah they grind it but it's not perfect so every few rows we're gonna check it with our laser and adjust as we go up so let's dampen this with the sponge put some thin set on it and build our next three courses [Music] all right well thing one and thing two are finishing up the fireplace jordan and i gotta run to the stone yard we gotta have a hearthmate gang so we made this template out of some spare cabinet skin material we had left over we cut it to shape just taped it together we've got written on it where we need the finished edges where we need the polished edges so let's head over there and see if they can make this for us i mean hard to screw that up isn't it [Music] we are back from the stone yard and that was a complete success they'll have that thing ready for us tomorrow if you remember the template we made from point a to point b was 110 inches long all their slabs were 108. mr keith told me we can get you a slab from houston that's longer and that'll work but it'll take a week and we don't want to wait that long he was talking to his warehouse guy warehouse guy said you know what we got some out in the parking lot boom they had 110 inch pieces it's going to work perfect he saved the day and we can't wait to get the hearth in it's going to look amazing now as you can see right here we took the ledger off the ledger was an insurance policy for us to make sure this first row is perfectly straight and to keep it from sagging as straight a stone can be that's right but the thinset we're using says no sag i don't really trust it on something like this but we're gonna try it down here when we put up these smaller sections and see if it's really no sag but for right now we gotta tackle this section at this cathedral ceiling now remember at the beginning of the video we showed you that i made these chamfer strips so that this stone had a nice square edge to die into and i went home that night and i thought well maybe it would look nice to have a piece of trim at the top too that way the stone is framed by a piece of this trim on all three sides that would look killer so i came back here the next morning and i cut a piece of kerdi as a prototype so let's hop on the ladder and let me show you what i came up with alright i have this piece of kerdi that i ripped and cut at an angle because i didn't want to waste my five quarter inch stock on a mock-up stuff is precious yes it is so that fits right there against the slope on the cathedral ceiling i've got the right miter cut on my stone and that's about how it would look and if you're using a tile saw and you're doing this same process on a cathedral ceiling and it won't bevel on you just do this a nice straight cut and it'll conform to that molding and look great but you know me i want to check every possibility so i wanted to see what it would look like if i remove this and this side of the stone is a compound cut i've got a bevel and i've got a miter let's put it up here against the ceiling and check that out that's the ticket that's it when i held this up here i knew that's the way i wanted to go everybody else loves it so we're going to bevel this whole row all the way across so now that we've decided on this method i got to know what is my bevel angle and what is my minor angle how am i going to find those we're going to show you all right gang i have a bosch electronic angle finder now don't freak out if you don't have one we're going to show you two more ways to do this but i love this thing it's a bosch dvm40l that model number has probably changed but you can see the digital display and it simply records the angle that these two arms are representing so i'm going to put it up here against the brick i'm at a 90 degree right here swing this arm against the ceiling check my reading i'm at 108 degrees or 18 degrees past 90 we're going to show you why that's important at the saw now let's measure this one for the miter cut one arm against the trim the other against the ceiling and i'm going to call that 109 degrees and if you don't want to spring for one of those bosch angle finders just go get yourself a smaller version of it this is an electronic angle finder available at the home centers very affordable and it fits in your toolbox and if you don't like electronic things just get yourself an old-school bevel square just like that it'll do the exactly the same thing so now that we have our angles let's head out to the saw and we're going to show you what we're going to do with them all right guys we're out here at our wet saw and look at the sky it's going to be a real wet saw here in a minute if we don't get going so remember our bevel angle is 108 degrees and our scale goes from 0 to 22 and a half to 45 remember 108 degrees is going to be 18 degrees on this gauge now we could eyeball it or we can just use the setting on here this face of the blade housing is parallel to the blade we just match that up and that's our bevel angle perfect it's going to be perfect now we're going to have to be switching back and forth between the bevel angle and a 90 degree cut several times so i'm just going to take my pencil and mark this gauge where that pointer is so i don't have to recalculate each time now let's get our miter angle the miter gauge on this saw is gone a long time ago so i just make my own out of a piece of kerdi i've got 109 degrees remember that was the angle that we need replicated here on the protractor i'm going to line it up against the edge of the kerdi we mark it we cut it and this is our fence we can put it on here put our stone against this side we can move it over here whatever you want it works great if you don't have your fence why are you using kerdi for everything i love this stuff it's lightweight it can get wet so what so now that we have our bevel and our miter established let's mix up some thin set and start laying some stones [Music] [Music] okay [Music] [Music] all right guys that part is done super glad about that that was a little tough hanging tile 10 feet in the air a lot of trips up and down the ladder but we did it now you remember that kerdi piece we cut at the beginning to act as a fence for our saw turns out we only use it for the very first row after that we realized that that drywall ceiling is kind of doing its own thing it wasn't 109 maybe it was 112 or maybe it was 108. so we had to custom fit each piece and all we did we measured the height of the piece the width connected those two dots and cut them on the saw and you saw that little piece that dropped off at the end that happened six times we had that little tooth sized piece that came off but it was very satisfying filling that in at the beginning of that row and then the last piece on top a little bigger than a tooth maybe a lion's tooth it was the cherry on top so tomorrow morning i'm gonna go pick up the hearth we're gonna slide that in put five rows there five rows there with that no sag mortar we're gonna check it out and then one row all the way across here on the floor to the bottom of a hearth to fill that in it's going to look beautiful so we're going to go home get the thinset off our hands and we'll see you tomorrow all right gang check it out look what i have in the back of the truck i went to the stone yard and picked up our heart one day turnaround stone yard did a great job they had the template so it made it really easy for them and check out that black that's going to look awesome in there and i don't know if you can see it but all the flecks in there really pick up on all the colors we have inside the house the golds the whites the grays it's going to look beautiful so our first step bring it in the house and get it level what do you say jordan teach your wheaties you ready yeah how much do you think this thing weighs right here i have no idea maybe 150. all right all right easy yeah let's do it you can do it by yourself [Music] all right guys the hearthstone is in here i'm gonna revise my earlier statement i think that thing's closer to 200 pounds what do you think george absolutely absolutely we leveled it in both directions and all we did game we just used some of these horseshoe shims to get it where we want it these are 1 16 of an inch thick i think we got two over here by jordan and two over here by me it is ready to go our next step is to undercut this piece of trim right here on both sides then we can push it all the way back for the final fit just going to use my buzz saw and use my trowel as a little spacer i put blue tape on the bottom to protect the stone and rest my blade on top undercut that clean it up slide it in let's get it done [Music] all right game we cut this right here and went to slide it back jordan's side went perfect mine did not because i'm hitting right here and what exactly is hitting is this part so i'm just going to chip a little bit of the brick off and i think we'll be fine i've got an old beater chisel and i'm just going to chip it off let's get to it [Music] [Music] all right king that came out fantastic look at the joint here against the wall and over here at the brick we got a little gap but that's just what we wanted when the stone's on there it's gonna look perfect just like that the beater chisel that was a little rough chipping that brick but in the end i think that was the right answer i could have used the grinder but then i would have had a cloud of dust in this room so now i just have a little clean up and we're ready to go i think we want to attach this hearth to the brick with some thinset i have a half a bag left over for when we finish the floor i think we can go outside mix up that thin set and secure this heart on that break for good [Music] we're supporting it so the stress isn't on that point boom so now i'm supporting it right here and now we're lifting up see if we can lift up from the outside i just kind of pick it up got the weight here check it out gang the hearthstone is in place it is level in both directions as you can tell from our bubbles on our levels now when we slid it back into place our shims probably got knocked back a little bit so we just made this little block of wood to hold it in place until that thinset dries that looks beautiful rip to the guys whoever have to take that out they're gonna have a hard time hopefully that's in the 2100s when they're taking this out at least at least a hundred years this thing's gonna enjoy a lot of hot fires right here i can't wait to see the whole thing finished and we're real close all we have left to do all we have left to do is the stone on the left the stone on the right and one course underneath the bottom here we've got that sag and slip resistant thin set we used we used it up here but remember we had our ledger to hold everything on this side we're going to start at the top work our way down to the hearth and we're going to see if that stuff is really going to hold the stones in place without a ledger so let's head outside mix up our thinset come back in here and start laying some stone hey real quick gang we wanted to show you the stone we're using on this fireplace it's by rock mount stack stone from msi in fact that's their website stackstone from msi.com look at all these colors man almost 60 of them it's crazy and this stuff is good for interior and exterior and these are six by 24 inch panels we've installed similar products in the past not this big and this is going really fast because it's such a big panel so the color we're using is silver travertine it's marked right there but look whatever your taste is i'm sure they got a color for you this blue stone i wonder what that looks like yep blues arizona gold glacial black wow fresco limestone i used to drink fresco when i was a kid all right gang we are ready to put our first piece of stone up we got it back buttered let's see if this thin set is really anti-sag or slag resistant all right you ready yup let's try it yeah all right well these are pretty heavy they are yeah they're very heavy six by twenty fours yep but that's all right it's not going to slow us down we'll just cut a little kickstand just like we did down here for the hearth and keep working let's head out to the saw cut this little guy keep working our way down [Music] nice [Music] all righty gang the face of this fireplace is done all we have left is one course under the hearth let me show you what we did on the left hand side and the right hand side of the opening in the time lapse you saw us do it a little bit different we started on the right hand side and we started working from the top down because we were using that anti-sags thinset but these are pretty heavy stones and we found on each one of them slipped just a little so we made those little wooden kick stands to help them hold it up while we took our final measurements but by the time we got to the bottom it was a real struggle trying to lift all that up because the thinset was setting up but we got this side done and we measured from the hearth to right here and it was 30 and a quarter inches it's the same on the left hand side so since we knew the measurement for the bottom piece of stone what our rip was we duplicated it on the left and worked from the bottom up you said it was 30 and a quarter but if each course is six inches and there were five courses well what's all that about you get a little creep or a little uh cumulative uh growth growth because you know these aren't perfectly tight some of them are but some of them aren't we found that that just what happens with this product so we started with the bottom over there like i said worked up to the top and that top row fit in perfect it was actually like squeaking right when it went in there yeah i like the bottom to top method way better it was much easier those sticks were in our way when we're trying to put the thinset underneath them right so all this left gang our final lap is to put one course right here we do have to rip them to five and three quarter to get them in there and then we have this uh 22 and a half degree turn we're gonna make and we're done i'm gonna head out to the saw rip those pieces and jordan's going to install them let's do it [Music] all right guys we just got to wrap this corner and we're done now i'm making a 22.5 degree cut here on my saw and i'm cutting it out of the same piece of stone so it looks like it wraps around wait do you see how that looks now all i'm doing here since i really can't measure it i'm going to approximate where that angle is with a pencil on the floor right there i'm going to hold up the stone and transfer that mark i can just see it peeking out right there so i'm going to mark it on the stone and that's our cut line let's go out to the saw and make that 22.5 degree cut [Applause] [Music] i won't scribe baseboard to flooring but hey i'll scrap a piece of stone with some baseboard any day [Music] we're done man that's awesome alrighty gang that fireplace is done well 99 done i got a little caulking a little grouting to do but other than that that thing is fantastic can you imagine coming in that front door for a party got a nice roaring fire there that thing is bang but man this thing turned out incredible from the miter we did on the very bottom to the coat we did at the baseboard to this heart that was just an idea four days ago we weren't sure we're gonna use this our stone yard came through cranked it out for us fit perfectly after a little bit after a little bit of break it fit perfectly after a little bit of brick surgery but you can't even tell now and then we got these champer strips on either side framing it so we have a nice straight parallel edge and then we broke that trend at the top with a mitered bevel so you can see the profile of the stone absolutely looks great looks like that stone just continues right through the ceiling just like it looks like this hearth grows right out of that fireplace this thing is phenomenal gang good job bud and now you're ready to tackle this project on your own gang if you don't have a towel saw just go to the home center your rental yard rent one for a few days you can knock this out you saw it didn't take that many special tile tools pretty easy to do and there's a bunch of colors pick out one of 60 colors to match your house and while you're there pick out some leather stone for your like button too because i know you got that old red brick light button you're going to want to upgrade it and maybe they even have some peak ledges down so it'll match the quarter round you got in your house once you get that new ledger stone on your like button smash it for us we really appreciate that drop your own tips and tricks in the comments below ask a question and subscribe if you haven't already we're almost at 100k that would really help us and we will see you on our next video [Music]

Channel: Stud Pack

Views: 580,896

Keywords: studpack, stud pack, renovation, remodel, construction, diy, house flip, fireplace, ledger stone, how to install stone on fireplace, wall stone installation, how to install ledger stone on a fireplace, installing ledger stone on fireplace, cement board, stack stone, wall tile, backsplash, tips and tricks

Id: 9Vc5cGQU3-4

Length: 25min 54sec (1554 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 15 2021