DIY Mantle Overhaul-Renter's Edition

So as I have posted before, I don't like this weird cave area over the fireplace and mantle. It's triangular shaped and there's an outlet and a cable hookup in there and it's a dark color. So I can't put anything a dark color in there because it gets lost and it's high enough up that you can't see it very well if it's not at the front anyway. I guess it was designed so that you could put your TV up there, but since most TVs are flat now it would sit on the front part and you don't need the big area behind it for that. But it's kinda high up for that in my opinion and I would never use it for that. So instead of just painting it (that would be the easier thing to do I guess!), I decided I was going to cover it up completely. Since we are just renting this house, we can't really do anything permanent. So I thought of a solution that is temporary but still looks good.

BEFORE I bought some bead board, trim and little corner things to frame it out, had them cut it for me right there at Lowe's because I don't do big power tools like that! Then I painted them cream.

Once they were dry I glued them around the edges and corners and let them dry. I don't have any clamps so naturally I used gallons of water! The water jugs were heavy and worked well for getting it nice and flat and glued down. I was thinking of stapling or nailing the pieces on when the glue was dry, but they were staying pretty good with the glue so I skipped that part.

So here's the non-permanent solution....I am using the 3M picture hanging strips that are like velcro. This wasn't too heavy and it is resting on the mantle, so I figured it would hold them up nicely to the wall. I positioned them onto the back and stuck them up to the wall. I followed the directions on the back of the package and took it back down for a day to make sure the sticky parts were stuck to the wall before adding the weight of the wood to it.

After a day, I put it back up on the wall, lining up the "velcro" pieces and here is the finished look!

AFTER:

The best part is, I did most of this without any help!! I'm pretty proud of myself for that fact! I'm not counting the wood cutting man at Lowe's or Aaron for helping me by holding up the piece while I positioned in on the wall. I'm pretty happy with the way that it turned out and we'll see if my "genius" idea actually works well.

Here's another project I did in the family room a while back that I never really took pictures of when I finished, but this is what gave me the idea for doing this. I used the 3M strips to hang these frames so I didn't have to hang all those nails and one day it hit me that I could do the same thing with the strips for the mantle!