One of our biggest advantages to moving to Virginia has been our home here. It fulfills all of my farmhouse living dreams come true. And I believe if and when we ever move away, this house will be one of the things we miss the most. Yet in all it's wonderfulness I kept telling my husband it wasn't quite perfect until we had a fireplace!
It seemed pretty silly that we moved all the way across the country from California to a much colder climate here in Virginia and yet our house didn't even have a fireplace! Even our house back home had one! So after a year and a half of talking about it we finally decided on buying an electric fireplace. We don't have gas where we live so a gas fireplace wasn't an option. And we didn't feel like we had the time or long term investment here to put in a wood burning one either. So electric was the final decision and I am actually quite happy with it!
We ordered the fireplace from Wayfair. We actually found the same fireplace on multiple sites under different listings (but exactly the same listing photos). We have found that buying furniture online - we hit up Wayfair, Overstock, and Amazon and can usually find the same items and then order the one with the best price.
While the fireplace was still expensive, it was on the lower end of fireplaces we were looking for. I wanted something with a white mantel and the bookcase was an added bonus. But even though it is beautiful, it is definitely evident it is more cheaply made. We had read up on the reviews and were prepared for what we were getting so we consciously chose a bigger hassle for the sake of a discount.
The fireplace came in about a million pieces. Think putting together Ikea furniture and then times it by ten! It was a little insane. And a few of the pieces didn't completely line up - but fortunately it is only noticeable up close (see below).
And a few gaps here and there. There were also a few pieces that came broken but my husband was able to glue them together to make it work.
After quite a few hours later the fireplace was complete and it is gorgeous! As for the electric fireplace element - it works great. It can run without any heat blowing which I think is a great feature. We had purchased it in the fall and were still occasionally running the air conditioning, yet I had my new fireplace running for it's cozy ambiance. It has a timer and multiple heat settings, all controllable by a handy remote (currently storing this remote and our Christmas light remote in that little white bowl pictured below).
We didn't have a ton of extra space for the fireplace so it's slim design ended up fitting our space perfectly. The shelves are more for styling than function - they are small and I felt like they needed to look nice to pull everything together. So I used mostly coffee table books to style the shelves and then I have two baskets on the bottom for DVDs we are currently watching and for a few of my son's books.
To hide all our TV cables, my husband put together a wireless set up similar to what we had at our old house. The cables run down to our basement for the DVR. And then we got a Playstation Slim (after our Blu-ray player died) that he mounted behind the TV so we can play DVDs while keeping it hidden.
The fireplace is a dream come true. I pretty much run it all day everyday whenever we are home. And I love that we can take it with us if we move and it can easily cozy up any room we want.
