Well, the basic benefits of a fireplace is fairly obvious. The artistic detail is quite often overlooked. Now we have changed old looks with some decorative molding and a piece of artwork that was lying around. All of this in half a day and for less than $100, this is unbelievable.

As far as fireplaces go, this one is fairly alright, you can see that it is been heavily influenced with the colonial style, but the problem is the top is just been forgotten about. What are we going to do is fill some architectural details using a nice big piece of white MDF. MDF or medium density fiberboard is a man-made wood product that's cheaper than real wood and pipes up beautifully. All we do is to look around the house, and we found something that makes artwork really, really nicely. In the center of it, we are going to place this piece of artwork which is really going to tie the room together.

I have the diagram, we are ready to go. Now to enhance our fireplace, we're actually using molding. What we're going to do is run it around the perimeter of that new piece of material, forming the same shape as the one inside, but if it's brick, you could stuck with it. You could pile it, you could even put some marble on it. Okay, so that's all the molding done, now I'm going to run a trimmed piece around the outside creating the depth.

There we go, now this is where you get to be really creative as far as your design goes. This piece of artwork, having it squared, I looked at it and I felt like I just didn't do what I was trying to achieve and that is elongate the space. Now, having it in the diamond pattern, I think it's perfect, it really, really looks nice. So, now that's in place, all I'm going to do is put one more piece of molding around the perimeter, nailed off.

When you using MDF it's very, very important that you put a nice big thick undercoat on and really seal it. Now it's time for the top coat. I'm going to do one nice accent color. It's going to be defused behind on the new piece of wood art. Now the reason that I chose red is because in the rest of the room what I noticed is they had a lot of red items. It's going to tie in really, really nicely.

Now to secure them in addition to the wall nice and tightly, what we are doing is screwing on the battens, these batons are screwed directly into the studs so that the whole thing is tight on the wall really strongly. All I have to do, screw into my batons, look at that. Now, adding this decorative centerpiece to this fireplace is really bringing up the architectural details in this room. Without this the whole walled seemed very, very plain. Now, it is just come bursting the life, for $48 it's hard to dress up a room as dramatically as this, this fireplace now is the center of this house.