Went shopping and came home to this!

Yesterday my mom and I went shopping to celebrate her Birthday!! Although the day was not too fruitful in the way of great finds, I did come home to something exciting :)
Rory worked on our mantel, well after he made a trip to Home depot and splurged on some nice new and much needed tools to accomplished building this ourselves.
You see we got a quote from a local custom wood worker to see what it would cost to job out our mantel. Well that was not quite realistic, so we passed and decided to give it the good ol' DIY try.

While I usually have my hand in most of the projects we have done, this one has me a bit bewildered. For some reason I just can see how it's going to work, and Rory seems confident enough to do it.
He is going to make a faux wood beam mantel. We had originally decided that a solid mantel would be nicer but the weight of it, and cost of the wood was too much, not to mention the waste of hardwood is not very environmentally friendly. So he is building a plywood base and is going to put up a thick (probably 1 inch) veneer walnut box over that.

This is what it looked like before.


Then with a bit of this...


We knocked off the useless round stucco mantel.


And my mock up via Photoshop of what we hope to accomplish.


Well this is where we are, today. Rory anchored one long piece of plywood around the curve into the brick that was underneath the stucco with 6 large bolts. Then he attached those smaller pieces of plywood to kind of make the skeleton of the box... geez I really have no idea what to call this technique. I think he should be writing this blog post.


Currently he is cutting out the plywood box to go over this. I'll update that later when he is done. Wish us luck on this renovation, and if you know what he is doing please explain it to me!


(Update)
While Baxter was doing this.
He looks uncomfortable doesn't he?


Rory was installing this.


Here you have our plywood mantel. Rory built this box as the hollow structure that will have the finished hardwood veneer attached to it. Now to buy some wood, which will we choose?