HOW TO DIY A DISTRESSED WOOD BEAM MANTEL

DIY DISTRESSED WOOD BEAM MANTEL

A distressed wood beam mantel can add the perfect amount of character and charm to a fireplace that needs some updating.  With a little bit of creativity and some DIY elbow grease, you can take a new wood beam, and give it the look of an old reclaimed barn wood beam.  To see the rest of this post and a ton of other DIY projects, head on over to Joyfully Growing Blog!

When we were just getting started on this project, the plan was to find an authentic reclaimed wood beam.  However, when we started looking around, the only reclaimed wood we were able to find locally was crazy expensive.  If you’re lucky enough to have a source for cheap reclaimed wood, then by all means, go for it! Since we didn’t want to spend a fortune on the options that were available to us, we opted to buy a new 4” x 10” wood beam from the local lumber yard, and took the distressing into our own hands!  It was a pretty fun project, and it turned out great! We got lots of pictures along the way so you could follow along.

DISTRESSING

Distressing wood is quite easy.  There is no right or wrong way to distress.  You can use whatever tools is at your disposal (non-tool objects work great also: rocks, cast iron pan, really anything that’s tougher than wood).  Our preferred distressing tools are: hammer, hatchet, screws, and crowbar. It feels counterintuitive at first, but you have to just go with it. Hit the wood with your hammer, take some chunks out of it with a hatchet.  Scratch, scrape, ding, and dent the wood to your heart's desire. What we have found is that more usually looks better than less. If you don’t distress enough, it ends up looking like a nice piece of wood with just a few random imperfections.  Here’s what our beam looked like after we finished distressing.

FINISHING

The next step is to take sandpaper to the rough edges, and smooth out any distressing that has started to splinter the wood.  This also prepares the wood to take stain. Once you’ve finished a light sanding over the entire board, you can stain and seal the wood.  Take a look at the final product!