Before and After: Check Out This Chic Solution for a Living Room with an Asymmetrical Fireplace
How do you design a living room when it has an uneven fireplace sitting oddly in the corner? Kristyn Jackson was baffled.
“It really threw off the whole flow of the room,” she writes. “There was also an extra two rows of brick on the right side—that made it even worse!”
Kristyn and her boyfriend renovated the South Carolina living room by first adding shiplap to the walls. But that didn’t fix the fireplace conundrum.
“I came up with the idea to add reclaimed wood vertically on the top half of the fireplace, which also made it feel higher, [and] add plaster to the mortar lines of the brick to camouflage the ’70s bricks that were in a straight line (which made the lopsidedness more obvious),” she writes. The couple created a mantle out of reclaimed lumber and, in what might be the biggest change of all, added a tall shelf out of scrap wood and installed it over the right side of the fireplace. It stylishly holds extra wood, “but more importantly, hides the extra rows of bricks!” Kristyn writes.
She says that the entire fireplace update only cost around $40 or $50 because the couple used as many reclaimed materials as possible. In addition to the shiplap installation, they opened up a wall between the living and dining room, again doing all of the work themselves. In total, they’ve spent about $450 so far on the room’s changes.
Kristyn’s biggest reno advice is to focus on what makes sense for your rooms. “Think outside of the box and adapt your project to make it work for you and your space!” she writes.
Thank you for sharing, Kristyn!