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Cladding the chimney

Early 2023 I got the idea to decorate the boring white walls of our chimney with wooden panels. After much inspiration, thinking, designing, convincing, buying, sawing, finishing and mounting, I finally finished this project in the winter of 2023-2024.

TL;DR: the before and after

Inspiration

I'm not sure anymore where I got the idea fist, probably browsing Pinterest but YouTube as well. I really liked the look of wall panels in .

The look I wanted was:

A bonus would be if the whole thing was more or less reversible, so that in the case we don't like the look in a couple years removing it is do-able. This meant: not painting the whole wall black and certainly not glueing the panels to the wall. Doing it that way also means doing some maintenance is possible.

Thinking

To make thi, I considered a few options:

What I landed at was making 2 layers: back panels that would go behind the nice looking front panels.

The back panels would serve both as a backdrop with black between the panels as well as be for mounting between wall and front panels.

For mounting, I used basically plain old french cleats: French cleats By Tenbergen" - I took the photoPreviously published: It's also posted on my own website., "CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

But french cleats with a small twist: instead of a separate small strip of wood on the front panels, I would just cust an opening in the back panels with the top edge at an angle, to mate with the wall-mounted cleats that would fit in the openings.

With some proper placement, the front panels would then hide those openings and the front would be super smooth.

At least, that was the idea.

To make this work, I had a few things to consider in the design:

And of course, I wanted to make optimal use of the materials I would need to buy, ie. wood, especially nice wood, is expensive.

Another benefit of the back panels would be that I could measure and fit those first, take them off and then make the front panels. I could do the latter flat on a table instead of on a ladder. And any imperfections and errors would be a bit more hidden by the black edges and shadows etc in the corners.

Designing

Since this is an indoor design project and a major part of our house, the WAF was quite important here :-). So, both for visualisation purposes as well to figure out all the dimensions and to make working drawing, I wanted to draw the whole thing in CAD.

First step was to get the actual dimensions of the chimney. Turns out it's pretty skewed and crooked if you look close enough. Any such imperfections I could also hide in the black edges of the back panels so the front panels could keep their straight edges.

With the dimensions I could model the chimney itself, with all the features like the base of the stove, windows etc in detail, in 3D. For that I used OnShape. I'm big on open source and would have liked to use something like FreeCAD, but I'm way faster with OnShape. I also started modelling the house in OnShape earlier, so I only needed to clear up some details to arrive at this model:

With that, I could make a unwrapped drawing to sketch and scribble on, on actual paper:

But the actual pattern, that was the hardest part of the whole process perhaps. Overall, some 20 different patterns were created, by me and my wife as well. Too busy, some edge too parallel-but-not-exactly, some pieces too pointy, ...

Luckily we both had the same vision it seems.

In the end, we landed on this pattern:

Note that I already have painstakingly drawn all of the pieces in CAD here.

All in all, that really help convince the both of us that this is what we wanted and had in mind.

Buying

So far for theory. I actually had to find materials as nice looking as what I had in mind, like from Scott Brown's video and Pinterest. Turns out getting high quality wood panels is really hard as an individual aka not a professional woodworker or furniture builder. I only needed a few panels. I also considered getting veneer and making the look I wanted with that, but that was also difficult to source and also I had never used veneer before.

After scouring the internet for suppliers near me (or at least in the Netherlands or Belgium if need be), I landed on a regular old building materials shop, just accross the highway from our house. The front panels 12 mm thick multiplex of fairly plain and simple poplar. Back panels are 6mm okoume triplex.

And of course, such a project is a nice excuse to buy more tools: a battery powered track saw was perfect for this job.

To get the right amount of wood: not too little but not too much while also leaving some room for error, I simply printed the pattern, cut out all the pieces and tried fitting them on the regular wood panel sizes of 122x220cm

Same of course for the back panels.

Sawing

Early november 2023, I finally had all the materials so I could really get going. Naive as I was, I hoped to get this done before Christmas and some guests the cool project I was making. That turned out a bit too optimistic, as these things tend to go.

As I planned earlier, I first created all the back panels, with the carefully placed openings in them. I labeled all the back panels with letters and the front panels with a number.

I started making the back panels I would see the least first, as a practice run. That is the left side, of which I apparently have no photos at all. Once I was happy with the left side I did the right side, which was a bit more challenging due to the overhang from the windows that the back panel would have to go just under.

Then came the hardest back panels: the front side. This must work around a bunch of nooks and crannies but is also split over multiple panels since the whole chimney is about 4.5m tall.

With the back panels all done, I could finally start on the most rewarding bit: the front panels. First again the bits that I'd see the least, on the left side:

The front panels require quite a bit of precision: any gaps between panels needed to be exactly parallel; any divergence will be very obvious. I designed the gaps to be the same width as the panel thickness, which meant I could use random offcuts as spacers.

Now, I really had my process down: take a back panel, put it on the table, reference it with the existing panels, add some spacers, draw the lines, align the track to that and finally cut! I moved all of my sawing equipment to the living room, right besides the work as you'll see in later pictures. With good dust collection, this was no problem at all. The kids would sometimes sleep on the couch and, to my amazement, not wake up from the track saw making a cut.

I left some extra on the right side of the front-side front panels so I could later draw the cut-off line all at once, to get the best accuracy and consistency.

With all the panels cut, to size, I was already quite pleased with the look:

Finishing

Only a few steps remaining for the front panels:

The back panels were simpler, they just needed to be painted black wherever they would be visible.

Mounting

Now, I could finally screw the front panels to the back panels one last time and hang them on the wall for good (I hope):

And with the last panel also in place, we're done!

Getting this on and off the wall is actually very doable with a tall ladder. Everything can be up and down again in some 15 minutes, but the panels can only be taken on/off in the right order.

Conclusion

That last picture is of January 31st, so all in all it took me about 2 months of evening spare time to get this done. You might have noticed the fireplace got a matching black makeover as well, in addition to our very pink couches getting replaced with an also fancy rounded couch to enjoy the new fireplace from.

This has been a very rewarding project though; I get to see this every day and it's an absolute eyecatcher to anyone who comes into the room.