As I mentioned at the end of my last post, I was mostly happy with how the Cassidy Creations Federal fireplace wall turned out, but there were three things I wanted to fix: add more doorknobs so each cabinet door has one, straighten the hinge on the bottom left small door, and add bricks to the floor of the fireplace.

Adding another set of doorknobs was easy. Fixing the hinge, not so much. When I hinged these the first time, I hadn’t glued the front facade to the back piece yet, so the door was flat on the desk. This time, the door ended up pushed slightly farther back than the piece it’s hinged to, which can cause the hinges to twist a little and the nails on both the top and bottom hinges to pop out after several openings and closings.

I tried putting a dot of glue on the tips of the nails before pushing them in, but it didn’t seem to matter. If they come loose, they can be pushed back in, but I imagine the holes are getting a little bigger each time, and eventually the nails won’t want to stay. Also, popped-out mails will be hard to fix if the fireplace wall is permanently installed in a house. I’ll just have to remember not to open and close that door too much…

Of course, the bricks would have been much easier to do before everything was glued together. To reduce the chances of getting paint on the wood, I painted a 3/8″ wide piece of egg carton material before cutting it into individual bricks.

You can’t really see it in this picture, but I scored the back side of the egg carton piece about 1/16″ from the edge and folded it over. That edge will cover the front of the wood.

Then I coated it with matte sealer.

When the sealer was dry, I cut 1/8″ bricks and glued them in. Rather than try to wedge funny-shaped little pieces of brick into the corners that you’ll barely be able to see, I cut larger triangular pieces to fit there.

Here’s how it looks with all the bricks glued in. Normally I would have snipped the corners off each brick to make them look more bricklike, but I didn’t bother this time since they’re all the way at the back.

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With the fireplace part of the Federal fireplace wall kit mostly done, I hinged the doors. I’d been putting this off for a while since hinges are intimidating (not to mention twelve of them!), and the hinges that came wit this kit were extra daunting since the hinges themselves had to be assembled.

The kit came with two packs of Realife flush hinges (a brand that’s no longer available). Each hinge has two pieces that need to be joined together with a hinge pin. Once the hinge pin is inserted, it gets cut down with wire snips. Just putting together the twelve hinges took at least an hour.

On to the hinging. I did my best to keep them straight and aligned with each other. I did the full height cabinet on the left and the taller cabinet on the right first.

Then I set the small doors in place, flush with the bottom. This leaves a gap between the upper and lower doors.

This kit started out as a huge jumble of wood pieces, with no parts list to help identify them. As I neared completion, I was left with a 3/32″ x 3/32″ x 1 3/4″ piece that wasn’t marked on any of the diagrams. Here’s what the instructions said about it:

Glue the 3/32″ sq. pc. to the front edge of the middle shelf on the right side, even with the top.

First of all, the instructions referring to it as a square threw me off, since the piece in question is actually a long skinny stick. Second of all… wtf? I’m pretty good with the English language, but I read this sentence over and over and just could not figure out what it meant.

Because the small doors come up just to the bottom of the shelf above, there’s nothing to block them from getting pushed in too far. This isn’t a problem for the other cabinets, which have shelves behind the doors. I decided the mystery piece should be glued to the bottom of the shelf, flush with the front edge, which could maybe(?) be interpreted as “even with the top.”

(Note that this is the bottom shelf, not the middle shelf. The middle shelf is scalloped, so gluing anything to or under the front edge of that shelf, “even with the top,” would have been impossible.)

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