Rustic Christmas Mantel

This holiday season we are sharing our simple rustic Christmas mantle with greenery, berries and DIY wood trees we cut out of pine and cedar.

We welcomed our son a little over two months ago so we have been living in baby town for the past 10 weeks. We are happy to report that while the blogging has been a little slow the past couple weeks, we are not only surviving but thriving with our new baby centered schedule.

Ha! Just kidding, we’re just barely surviving but we can’t complain. Life is hectic but awesome. We are so in love with our little Gray House intern. Boy, does he keep us busy!

I applaud those moms out there who have babies near Christmas and still manage to decorate a house full of beautiful Christmas decor and do all the normal Christmas time activities. I am unfortunately not that mom. Oh well, there is always next year.

We put up our Christmas tree in our library and decided to focus on our mantel this year. Our goal was to keep it very simple. We wanted to pick out and make a few new pieces to give our mantel a makeover for Christmas.

Our first step was to build a fireplace mantel cover to go over our existing white mantel. We wanted one that would better match the wood plank wall in our reading nook. We purchased a 48″ wreath to hang above the mantel.

We bought the greenery from Hobby Lobby. We then added in strands of berries and little string lights to the garland.

DIY Wood Trees

We had been eyeing marble trees at Target to use on the fireplace mantel but we wanted quite a few. We couldn’t afford to buy eleven of the marble trees so we decided to make them out of wood instead. I am so glad we went in this direction because it fits with the rustic aesthetic much better and hardly cost us anything at all.

We have become big fans of cedar fence planks as a material for projects. Sometimes it takes a while to sort through the pile of cedar fence planks at the hardware store to find nice planks, but the color variation looks great and you can’t beat the price.

We made templates for the three different sized trees (download our template below) and cut them out using a jigsaw.

We might not have went all out this year when it came to Christmas decor but sometimes shopping for Christmas decor overwhelms me so it was much easier to focus on one area of our home. A rustic Christmas mantel makeover was the perfect way to add a little coziness to our living room this winter.