A Tiny Bit of Warmth for the Living Room

This is part of our Tiny House, Tiny Bloggers series, in which we turn over Plaster & Disaster to some VERY tiny bloggers to tell their own story of transforming an ugly, old (doll)house into a fresh and modern (doll)home. Follow it from the beginning here.

Disclaimer:  Inclusion on this blog is not an endorsement by Plaster & Disaster of the tiny blogger’s methods or design decisions.  Plaster & Disaster cannot be held responsible for your terrible decor choices after reading one of their tutorials.  All opinions are their own.

Hey guys and dolls and blocks of wood!  Tiny bloggers here.

We’ve been proud of all the living room progress we’ve been showing you, but we also know we have a lot more work to do before it is finished and as bloggery and MCM-filled as it can be.

We decided that one project that would really take the room to the next level of trendiness and mid-century-ness would be a bright and colorful MCM woodstove, ala one of these:

Of course as usual they don’t make something like this in our size, so as usual we needed to create from scratch. We hemmed and hawed about what to use as the body of the stove, before realizing that it looks exactly like a funnel. Sage and Naomi were kind enough to navigate Amazon for us to buy a multi-pack of small funnels, since we weren’t sure what size might work best in our space.

Once they arrived, we picked out the most likely contender. The next step was to create a bottom for it, since of course we need a place for the fire to sit (or faux fire…we’d advise that lighting a fire inside a plastic funnel is a poor idea). We decided that a thin piece of wood would work best, and so we started by tracing the bottom of the funnel onto it.

Next Sage used her jigsaw to cut out the circle.

With such a thin piece of wood and a small circle it was hard to get it perfect, but once she got it cut we clamped it and used an orbital sander to even out all the edges nicely.

It fit!

Next we had to cut the opening in the funnel. This proved to be difficult, but we were up to the challenge (which mostly involved supervising Naomi while she did the manual labor). She drew a semi-circle onto the side that would become the opening, and then used an x-acto knife to cut along the line. The hardest part was getting the blade through without pushing too hard and cracking the whole funnel…it was a nail-biter, but we prevailed!

With the major components taken care of, we just needed to add a smaller base for the stove to sit on, which we did using a small dixie cup that we cut down to a one-inch sliver.

We also needed to create a larger square base for the whole thing to sit on to protect the floor, for which we used the same thin wood we’d used for the bottom of the stove. I helped out by providing a straight edge.

Sage cut a square using the jigsaw again, and then cut out a notch to go around the corner soffit that we knew would be in the way.

Lastly, we needed something cylindrical to extend the vent pipe to the ceiling. We found a plastic cylinder that was left over from a longer section of cord cover Sage that used to coral the cords in her living room, which was a perfect fit.

Then it was time to paint! We used high gloss black spraypaint on the base of the stove, high gloss turquoise on the body of the stove, and high gloss white on the square floor base. As a last step, we glued everything together and then put it in place!

We dabbed just a little glue around where the vent meets the ceiling so as to seal any smoke from escaping.

And you might be wondering how it vents to the outside when it goes straight into the ceiling above which is our master bedroom. Great question! We don’t have an answer for you, but we hope you enjoy looking at this beautiful addition to our living room!