DIY How To Install Stone on Your Fireplace Easily

alright there are approximately half a billion but ugly fireplaces in this world today and if you're one of those proud owners today we're going to show you how to pimp out your fireplace with some brand new Lech Dover so we're here at Max's house today and it's kind of funny because I think he's been renovating more than I have recently he called me up because he's working on this room and he needed some help with his beam and a few other details so I've been kind of quarterbacking his renovation from the phone but today I'm here to give him a hand and we thought we'd make this video if we can show you how to pimp out your fireplace like let's face it everybody's got a built out wall and a mantel and the idea of starting from scratch and refacing the entire thing is really overwhelming but you can keep it simple if you just take it back one step to change the surround of the fireplace maybe a paint job on the wood and you're good to go so let's just start from the beginning what do you need in order to do this project well you need cement fiber board or even plywood now I like to cement fiber board better because it bonds better to the cement that we're gonna use so and they run about the same kind of price a little difficult to cut you're gonna want to get a special blade for your saw you can ask the guy your hardware store for help on that but they make a special blade just for this material and it's only 20 bucks so I won't bust the bank but it's important to have the right material here because when you have your stone attached to it in the unlikely chance that you have some extreme vibrations in the ground this kind of thing can separate and if it's ten feet in the air and it'll come crashing down the land on somebody because of these one of these supports the other it's a little bit dangerous so just bear the warning don't put this right on drywall that's really a bad idea now ledge stone really simple a lot of these products aren't real they are manufactured stone and so they cut really easily instructed max he picked up a little tile wet saw at the hardware store for about a hundred dollars it's about the same price as a rental and the little unit actually has more flexibility so he's able to mitre outside in 45 corners so we're going to show you that in just a minute but basically what we're doing is we're tapped into this to the cement board it just fits together like a puzzle and you need to use the right amount of cement I'm suggesting for your cement using half by half-inch trowel this might seem like a lot of overkill but it is gonna give you a great bond and it's gonna guarantee that you're gonna have great adhesion you want to have about 100 percent adhesion on the stone just because of the weight of it okay okay so when it comes to I'll blend up we don't discriminate I don't care what the building story you deal with right now I think this product was available to Lowe's right max Lowe's carries Mapai or you can go to your tile supplier I love this mortar I've been using it for years it's the ultralights okay now they don't package it the same at this at the Lowe's store they call it a light mortar but where I get it we call it ultra light this stuff has an amazing property it'll carry 40 pounds per square foot of cement on the wall see you slap your stone on there it'll just stay in place so use this kind of thing if you're ever putting tile on a ceiling or something like that as well we're using this because it comes white and so is our stone we don't want to risk any dyes that are in a gray cement bleeding through the stone and changing its appearance okay so that's always a consideration as well when you're mixing this you don't want to mix it like regular Smit this should be light and fluffy it's almost kind of like Cool Whip believe it or not it's ridiculous so if you make it really thick like the other like your peanut butter texture like you would a regular cement you're actually wrecking the performance of this product cuz you don't have enough water in it so make sure you read the instructions I say this every time but read the instructions and know how much water to mix in a bag okay and then you'll be good to go typically with ledge stone the manufacturers manufacture two kinds of panels one is the body panel and one of them is an outside corner panels now for whatever reason this manufacturer has three rows and it's got a step like this so you can't you can't use this on an outside corner without cutting it down they don't make an episode corner panel now if they do they sure weren't selling it and the Stover max bought the stuff so he got a great deal that may be why so I'm gonna teach him a trick that even though they sell the outside corners I don't like to buy them in a lot of cases I prefer to miter the outside corner because I think it just gives it an amazing look so I'm gonna show you how to do that today and I'm gonna run max through the process so that he knows how to finish this mantle all by himself and then I can get back to work so Max and I were just talking off camera apparently he got this stuff for about six and a half bucks a square foot which is awesome deal because generally ledgestone runs around twelve um which is why I don't like to buy the outside corners because usually that's closer to 15 per square foot for those boxes so here's my system really easy we're gonna place it up against the wall we're gonna make a mark I suggest using a marker when working with stone because it makes a good Merc and when you're on the wet saw a pencil just isn't gonna work now the idea here is that is the size of the stone right to this point in the wall basically here and I cuts on a 45 degree angle and you want to get that cut no if you buy a cheap little table saw like we did it'll have more than enough power to deal with this it won't work on porcelain but it'll work on this just fine what you have to do is you have to cut the stone in half and then add the miter joint so this is the line there's your 45 what we're gonna need to do is make our cut right here add about 1/8 to 1/4 and that's my cut so I'm gonna cut that line on the stone then I'm gonna lift the table and run both sides of it through the saw and we'll end up cutting this out and then we can eventually fold it over onto that corner maybe we should just do it and show you so if you end up buying one of these tables instead of trying to rent them which is probably a good idea like why rent when you can buy you're gonna find that this wheel goes on here and the bottom of the wheel goes to the water and comes up with it doesn't have a pump system pumping water onto the cut it's not necessary like I said now typically with a wet saw the wheels turning this way and it's throwing water at you so you will get wet all right so here's my cut line I'm putting the stone upside down on the table all right need me up with the sees so in if you need to see you're gonna get wet [Music] [Music] whoo okay so now we cut them later lift the table up to 45 and just set it right there and off we go [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] well here we go we have our outside corner we have it mitered it fits together it looks okay it doesn't look amazing and it took us almost 15 minutes and I'm soaking wet so here's the deal here on this channel we try our best to show you how to do things at home a DIY with tools that you already own or things that you can rent or things that are affordable now this saw was affordable however this stone is actual stone it's not it's not a man-made product it's not soft at all it's real chunks of granite and that saw is not powerful enough to cut through and do the 45-degree angle so we're abandoning the miter joint alright just because we can this would actually take a little if that saw holds out and there's a real good chance that we're going to burn out the motor long before we get there so we're gonna go to a straight cut installation so what we have to do now because we have three levels the way you do this is you go with the middle stone set your thickness with your off cut okay make sure they're about the same all right add a little bit of space here for your mud all right and then go down here with your measuring so if that's my mud that's what I like alright what we're gonna do is this bottom one is simple you just cut it straight off okay keep the peace be able to use it problem me for another section maybe you'll be able to take it and put it up here alright so we actually did to cut here earlier so this is the piece that would fit in this gap so if this person that this is the one you cut off you can stick it up here there you go then you can just measure straight from this corner to the wall cut it straight and stick it in and everything is good alright so I think that's the way we're gonna have to do this it'll make our life a little bit simpler [Music] do not buy that saw for use on real stone my god listen QEP I love you but that saw needs a disclaimer to be only used with thin ceramic okay Wow okay so we're mixing our ultra light cement here because this job is so tedious I would suggest mixing small batches at a time just so that you're not wasting your cement once it starts to set up you really don't want to try to force it to perform on the wall it's best to throw it out so you got about a 30 minute working time with this stuff which is plenty if your stones all cut in advance or you have a second person helping you but you're working alone do a bunch of cuts first keep your batches small [Music] that is almost perfect I know that sounds scary but it's almost perfect you'll see how much the little powder makes a big difference here [Music] okay it's not stiff enough yet we're getting close though [Applause] [Music] one second here's how you want to test to see if your mud is good stick your blade in and just lift it up it should hold its shape without sagging it's just a little bit thin still just a touch now generally you want the stuff to sit for about ten minutes before you use it and which time it'll get a little stiffer but you can't come back two minutes after you've mixed it and then so I need a little more powder now you'll have different ingredients in there setting at different times and that's a great way to make the tile job fail here we go now clean the blade we're ready to roll all right so we need a few more minutes to wait till it sets up I just thought I'd show you real quick if I travel it you can see how the ridges in the pail hold their shape all right that's what I'm talking about this stuff is really soupy but it's ultra light and it does work differently than regular cement so you need to respect that this can be really expensive to use if you mix it like the other cement you'll only get half of the yield out of the bag no sudden that becomes $80 a bag quick hurry okay made a mess so the secret for applying cement is just get it on the wall first okay it's a lot like drywall if you've seen our drywall videos you want to I'm not always running up there is such a thing is not enough now when I'm doing my tile I like to have my my lines horizontal it's just a personal preference I don't think it makes a whole lot of difference but for me you know the backs of these have all been machined so it's very smooth and with a half inch trowel line you don't need to worry about how to set it in the wall he just go again set your depth all right here we go okay and then it's real easy you can just open the box and fly like the wind it's like little Tetris pieces here mm-hmm of course this is the easy program you just spend a lot more time doing your cuts than you will actually putting it on the wall I'll press it into the cement you're not just trying to touch the wall you're trying to embed it all right we'll go like this there's our next piece now when you're doing this side over here you can put this stone first and then just put a couple of screws into the wall underneath it to help carry the weight until the cement dries up you just take the screws out add the next piece put the screws back in as you go nice and easy and of course you can see I've got different stagger lines just so that you don't get this reoccurring pattern of the joint even though it's a natural stone it's a man-made pattern so you don't want to have something going step step step step step step step you break it up cut your stone different sizes and then you'll have great success with the visual appeal this stone is susceptible to expansion and contraction so if everything opens up one day because of the hot weather you'll see that that step stone effect and it'll scream at you this way there's no design visible and everybody who love it since it carries 40 pounds of square foot it's done before it drives great that's not going anywhere we're just gonna kind of as we go get this on and in position double-check our thickness over here I want to make sure I got a little bit of an overhang so I got room for cement behind the stone we're good no look at this this stone is not manufactured properly right so here we go put the stone in it's nice and tight but this one is manufactured poorly this joint is bad and it opens up so you see the movement here you split the difference you'll end up causing an extra gap that won't occur somewhere else so what I'm gonna suggest you should just go like this click your marker now you know this one can only be used to fill the sides you have to get rid of this glue joint here right we're going to take it off and out of the way now this kind of product is going to come with all kinds of different problems give me bad angles and different size cuts it's not going to fit together perfectly so don't expect it to which is why you want to have the right color cement them behind in case there's any gaps you see something that's white and gray in the back okay and that comes across looking very natural well there we go this is the basic process get cement on the wall and add stone to it outside of that is just measuring and cutting don't be afraid to finish the entire project in one day you can go as high as you want like I said the cement itself is what's holding the stone to the wall so it's not like a situation where you got to use brick ties or anything like that it's not gonna fall off as you build and like with any natural building product this is all natural pieces of stone here there's nothing manufactured you're gonna get imperfections you're gonna get different things different colors different minerals you know so personally I like to see all that kind of thing I think it's part of what makes it really attractive some people might not like to see how rustic different elements are so make sure you consult with your spouse as you're building to make sure everybody in the room is gonna be happy with the finished result because once this is dry its dry and then coming up without a fight so not something I'd suggest a guy would do while his wife is away for the weekend this would be a great partnership kind of situation because then they can say I don't like the one with the rust you can pull that out or you know I have seen it all so I would suggest for this to rent a saw if you have natural stone keep with the square ends don't worry about the overall presentation it's gonna look beautiful it's all natural stone if you liked this video hit the like button subscribe to the channel if you haven't we've got a ton of awesome projects on there for you to check out feel free to go by and check out our website if you'd like to do some browsing but particularly we have a website home rental vision diy.com and on there you can check out and search by a different title and can interests that you have and hopefully something there will be good for you and if you have a video suggestion by all means send us a comment and if you have questions or above the products or materials or techniques hit the comments section below we answer those comments every day and so we're glad to be in touch with you that way thanks for joining us [Music] as you can see the project is now finished now it took me four days to do this as opposed to the original one day I thought it was gonna take me and as somebody who does not do this for a living just the camera guy and editor I thought there'd be some value and telling you the problems that I ran into doing this project so Jeff had instructed me how to do a couple things however I had neglected to tell him that we're gonna use real stone so hence in the video he saw us doing those 45-degree cuts now those 45-degree cuts although they took a very long time to do that is the proper technique and it would have worked really well in full brick however on that type of stone didn't work that well so we had to abandon that and just go flat on the front and then just go flush on the sides now with this type of stone you can't really cut it on 45 degrees with perfect results reason being it's real stones they've got different densities you've got different minerals thicknesses and the type of saw use is really important so yes you can rent a bigger saw however those bigger saws the tabletop saws don't want a 45 degree angle so it's pretty difficult to do now that little saw does go on a 45 but I just recommend doing straight cuts so if you're doing this type of project the reason we kept the 45-degree cuts in the video just so that people know how to do it if they're using full brick now we use real stone so it was a lot more difficult but it is complete now some of the problems I ran into first thing was the cutting it did take a long time however I realized if you pick the type of stone that's not too thick so pick where your cuts are trying to pick stone that isn't as thick so don't just go through a box and pick the first BCC pick the thinner pieces it's much easier to cut it's gonna be a lot quicker also face up is much easier because you've a flat surface on the bottom it's easier to cut if you have it upside down it's all wobbly and your cuts aren't gonna be straight so that's something I learned now another thing I learned is when you're buying this type of stone you're probably going to go and try to get on sale something like that if you do go get on sale which is great save some money however open up all the boxes and look at all your pieces when we opened up these boxes it was almost a month after a bottom half the pieces had damage on them they were 20% off and there's a lot of problems so what I had to do is go and actually return half the boxes so that a big thing I was lucky it was the last day so able do it but make sure you check your materials now the last thing is the saw itself I do recommend that little saw actually it is slow but it does work and it's worth the price if you're gonna rent assault stained glass through ninety dollars a day and it's not necessarily the speed of thus I found that was the problem it's the fact you want to measure everything correctly it takes a long time there's a lot of little cuts a lot of angles you want to make sure you get everything correct because if you mess it up it's gonna be expensive now the pieces that come there's no corner pieces as Jeff mentioned but the piece is actually very versatile so you can cut off the ends and then you can use them in other rows there was almost no wasted witness I think I wasted maybe three pieces and that was because some pieces broke or I made a mistake or something so very efficient I still have three or four leftover boxes which I could use for another project so I highly recommend doing this it was a great project and if you'd like the final result and you want to chop yourself and do this by all means give it a shot and if you like this video make sure you subscribe and like the video helps us a lot thanks for watching

Channel: Home RenoVision DIY

Views: 1,594,989

Keywords: jeff thorman, home reno, renovation, bathroom, do it yourself, diy, how to, tutorial, step by step, home reno vision, home renovision, renovision, constractor, renovate, ledge stone, firepalce stone, brick on fireplace, fireplace stone, fireplace accent, rustic

Id: LJDs_cF8pVQ

Length: 24min 29sec (1469 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 24 2017