We made a flying trip down to Tennessee last weekend.  I briefly mentioned that fact in the post where I updated the house progress.  Which I will be sharing the progress from this past week shortly.  Anyway, I have been sharing in our newsletters (sign up here) over the past several months that we needed a few more HUGE fireplace mantels for our new house.  We will have a total of four.  You can see where they will be in the post where I shared the layout of the house. 

I received an email from a girl in Tennessee who had two mantels for sale.  They were taken out of the same 100 year old home.  She sent lots of pictures for us to view and we made the decision to make the 6 1/2 hour drive to see if we liked them.

100 Year Old Fireplace Mantels

We decided they are both GORGEOUS and brought them back with us.  Because our rooms in the new house will be large and our fireplace walls are expansive, we need mantels that are HUGE!  These happen to be close to 7 1/2′ wide and over 5′ tall.  ????  They are so hard to find around our area here in Ohio.  Every mantel that I have found on the marketplace is about half of that size.  We now have three mantels that size in our possession, which are all stuffed here in the cottage.  ????  And, we have another one in storage that is smaller.  If you know if any larger ones like this, we may be interested.. and then sell the one in storage.

I knew they would have to be stripped because over the years, the finish on them started bubbling up.  We got these mantels home and I immediately started working on stripping them using the oven cleaner method.  They were SO EASY to strip that way.  

I started panicking a bit during the stripping process.  Because the wood was bright red when it was wet.  But they dried this really pretty wood tone.  We believe they are walnut, which I don’t have anything else walnut in the house.  But, as you know, I mix all different wood tones together and love it.  

I didn’t seal them with anything yet, but may add a warm sealer to warm up the color a bit, You can’t tell by this picture, but this one is setting in front of our white mantel.  ????  We are running out of space here in the cottage. 

And this one is leaning up against the wall in the entryway.  

I absolutely love how they turned out and think they will look marvelous in our new house.  Stay tuned for that!  It’s all happening really soon!