Quick Mantle Refresher

This week all of the Christmas decorations came down.  Alas the Christmas joy is gone, but it definitely gave us our Living Room back!  One of the gifts we got for the holiday was a pair of metal scroll pillar candle holders.  We wanted to flank the mirror over the fireplace with these, so we decided to take on the project last night.

Here is the fireplace and mantle area before the new addition:

This turned out to be about a 15 minute project.  A little quick math, a few wall anchors and screws to hang the wall art from... it was all we needed to freshen up this area.  We wanted to center the scrolls on the wall space remaining on either side of the mirror and center them on them on the mirror as well.

We wanted to use the wall anchors to be sure that once we added the weight of the pillar candles, it wouldn't pull a simple screw out of the wall.  we used a small size anchor, and screwed the screw into the anchor about 80% of the way, leaving just enough out to hang the art.

And here is the after photo:

It looks like the one candle is leaning forward a bit, I'll be bending it a little to even them out once I'm done with this post!  I'm still deciding what I'd like to do on the mantle.  Right now we are using it for a lot of picture display, but I might want to change that up a bit. 

This summer we need to repaint the mantle, for whatever reason, the first coat of paint did not adhere well, and now everything we put on the mantle sticks and then takes a little paint with them.  So another project for another day, but this was a quick one for our Friday night.