When we bought our house, one thing it did not have was a fireplace mantle. Of any kind. There were 8″ square white tiles around it and on the floor as a “hearth”. After 13 years, it was time to change. We ripped out the carpeting and pulled up the tile. I replaced it with 3″ off white, tumble stone tiles. The fireplace had a large flat black sheet metal apron above the grate that looked awful. After looking at the specs for safety concerns, I tiled over it as well.
One evening, I made a simple (simple!) floating shelf that was up for a year over the fireplace. Kim was ecstatic to have something. We both knew it was a temporary measure as we decided what we wanted.
Eventually, we decided on a mission inspired design. The twist was, as with most things I build, Kim wanted to be able to put lights on the shelf, but would NOT tolerate visible wires. No cords running off the shelf and down the wall to an outlet.
So, I made the shelf removable with a couple shallow cord divots at the wall side of the shelf. We can pull the shelf away from the wall, feed power cords down the divots to a hidden outlet. Perfect!
The bear in the build was the curve. You can’t see it, but that piece is 2″ thick. There is no gap behind it. It is tight against the tile. It is mounted to the pillars at the bottom point, but is allowed to expand/contract upwards. There shelf has a pocket cut into it to provide the expansion space.
Anyway, I did not have a decent bandsaw at the time. Just a inexpensive, small Delta bandsaw. I had to balance this 5′ x 10″ x 2″ Beam on a 8″ x 8″ table as I slowly fed the oak beam through the blade. I think it took about 40 minutes to cut the curve. Then I had to clean it up. That took a couple/few hours of hand sanding. Good times!
But, it turned out great! We are both happy with the results. It has been in-place since 2004-ish.