Project Fireplace – A Cozy Cardboard Creation

After two years of forging weapons, I took my cardboard blacksmithing skills to make something cozier: a mini desktop fireplace.

Inspiration

Hong loves fire. Fireplaces and fire pits have always caught her eyes. She holds hotels and malls to high regard when they have particularly nice fire features, and often talks about wishing to have one at home. We joke about taking fire heaters from certain outdoor restaurants and placing them on our balcony, but the reality is that no such thing is compatible with condo living.

On her birthday, we got a couples massage at our favorite parlor nearby. In the room was a portable electric fireplace similar to the product below found on Amazon. It had a plastic shell and a mostly flat image of fire, looking obviously “fake”. But its emission of warm air, mildly flickering orange light, and synthetic crackling sound did elevate the ambience with a comfortable feeling. We both enjoyed it.

I thought it was amusing that people would take a space heater and slap an appearance over it to pretend it’s a much older piece of technology. Even funnier that such a simple dress-up makes a $50 appliance worth $840. Then it got me thinking…

We have good heating at home. There’s no real need for a space heater, wood burning or electric. Thus the marginal value of a fireplace mostly has to do with its look and sound. Plenty of “screensaver” type of videos on YouTube provide far more realistic animation of fire than this bare-bone electronic device. They don’t work well only because a TV screen isn’t a convincing place to have burning wood… until we put an old-timey fireplace frame around it.

I could build a frame around our 62″ TV but that would be laughably impractical. A tablet-sized screen would be ideal, but I had just sold our three old devices recently. Fortunately, we also had a spare phone in the drawer. It’s a bit small but comes with a great OLED display. Since it hardly got any use, it might as well become a dedicated fireplace.

The Crafting

Just earlier that day, Hong had pointed at the shipping container for one of her birthday presents and informed me what a nice box it was. I didn’t have a project in mind and was gonna bring it downstairs for recycling. Now I changed my mind and she was right – this cardboard’s thinness and firmness was perfect for this job, allowing for precise cuts and sharp edges.

I downloaded a few high-res videos of wood-burning fireplace and transferred them onto that unused OnePlus phone. Then I took measurements of the phone’s exterior and its video-playing screen. To make the fireplace convincing, I figured that the frame had to meet several requirements:

Has an opening to display most of the fire-burning video but show absolutely no border around it
Assembled to hold the phone snugly in place, without allowing it to shift left or right even one millimeter
Be precisely fitted front to back so the phone would stand tightly against the opening without leaning back

Lastly, while I could in theory glue the phone in place, it’d be rather silly having to plug an USB-C cable into a fireplace. I wanted to build it with a door so I could remove the phone for charging, and use it without any external attachment.

Voila!

After three days of cutting, gluing, and painting, the fireplace was done. This was a straightforward project but it was also extremely satisfying, in part thanks to the nice material that I was working with. While the highlight was the realistic video of fire and its accompanying crackling sound, the simple frame trimming gave it a convincing look as a miniature fireplace.

So there… I made a birthday present from the garbage part of a birthday present… 🙂