100 + Year Old Mantle

My grandparents, who live in Atlanta have a 2nd home in Carnesville, GA a little town north east of Atlanta. They both grew up in Carnesville and each July my family spends a weekend there.  In 1985 they purchased their home, a beautiful house built in 1910. It is everything a country home should be...warm, inviting and just oozing with southern charm. This past July, my PapaJack was showing us some items in his garage when we came upon a mantle. It was hard to get a full glimpse of the mantle as it was partially covered with other furniture, but we could tell it was cool and it became even cooler when he told us it belonged to his mother. 

He said we could have it if we had a place for it. Brent and I talked it over and decided we thought it could be a really cool feature in our dining room. We have two fireplaces in our house, one in the living room and one in the dining room. 

Here is a shot of our dining fireplace situation:

While this fireplace is fine, it's no 100+ year old family heirloom so after confirming the dimensions would work we knew we wanted it! 

We headed up to Carnesville to pick her up and brought reinforcements with us in the form of Brent's mom Cindy and his brother Scott because PapaJack let us know this piece was REALLY heavy. He wasn't lying! At 85 1/2" tall,  57"wide and solid through and through, this mantle was a challenge to load, unload and maneuver into the house. 

Within the hour of getting the mantle into the dining room, Brent got out his tools and began removing the existing fireplace surround. 

We knew going into it there would be some modifications needed before the mantle could officially be set into place. But seeing the surround totally stripped down really got our wheels turing at the possibilities like the black marble....do we keep or change? We haven't decided...

As for the mantle itself we haven't quite nailed down what we are going to do with it finishing wise. 

If you look closely you will notice there are a lot of intricate details in the mantle, some of which have been damaged over the years, so we are definitely going to have to refinish and repair (where needed). Obviously we are not professionals in this arena, so we are going to do our research and plan to talk to professionals before attempting to do anything that would alter the integrity of the piece. 

We are so excited and honored to be entrusted with this family heirloom and we can not wait to watch this piece play an intricate part in bringing our entire dining room to life. 

All photos are my own.