Fireplace Makeover & TV Entertainment Center in Neptune Beach, FL

The Project

Neptune Beach is full of solid homes, and this one had a living room worth investing in. Crown molding, hardwood floors, built-in cabinetry flanking both sides of the fireplace wall. The bones were good. But the fireplace itself was holding the whole room back, an older wood-burning unit wrapped in mosaic tile, a chunky white wood mantel sitting on top, and a flat-screen TV mounted above it with a cord hanging down in plain sight.

The homeowners wanted something modern. Clean face. No mantel shelf interrupting the wall. A linear electric insert that sits flush with the surround and looks like it belongs in a newer build. They sourced the fireplace insert themselves, had their electrician and plumber ready to hook it up, and called us to handle everything around it.

The Challenge

Ripping out a wood-burning fireplace is not a quick afternoon job. The old mosaic tile surround, the mantel, the entire face, it all had to come off cleanly without wrecking the framing behind it or the floors in front of it. And once that opening was exposed, we had to resize and frame it correctly to receive the new linear insert, which sits much wider and lower than what was there before.

The opening in the wall told the whole story. Wiring coming from multiple directions, existing framing that was sized for a different unit, drywall edges that needed to be cut back and rebuilt. You can see in the during photos how open that cavity got before we started closing it back up. The TV mount was already on the wall, which meant we were working around a fixed point above while building everything below it from scratch.

The Build

Once the demo was done and the trades had finished their rough-in work, we came back to close everything up. The new opening got framed to match the insert dimensions exactly. No gaps. No shimming it with scrap later and hoping it holds.

For the surround, the homeowners wanted large-format porcelain with a marble look. That gray-and-white veined stone you see in the photos. Full slab appearance, high-gloss finish, with movement in the pattern that runs diagonally across the face. We set it in USG cement board first, proper substrate for tile work around a heat source, then went up from there.

Large-format porcelain is unforgiving. Any variation in your substrate shows up in the final surface. We floated the cement board flat before a single tile went up. The insert drops straight into the opening with a black frame edge sitting tight against the stone face. No base. No mantel. No wood trim trying to dress up a weak install. Just polished stone from the floor to the TV mount, with the fireplace opening cutting clean through the middle of it.

Three recessed puck lights were set into the surround above the insert opening. That detail matters more than people realize. When those lights hit the glossy porcelain face at night, the veining in the stone comes alive. The whole wall reads completely differently depending on the lighting, and that was the plan.

The Result

That fireplace wall used to be forgettable. Now it anchors the entire room.

The linear electric insert sits flush in the stone face with the black frame as the only border. No mantel, no tile strips, no chunky surround eating up visual space. The large-format porcelain runs edge to edge, flanked by the white shaker built-ins on both sides, and the TV mount sits centered above the whole thing ready for the screen to go back up. The contrast between the warm wood shelving, the white cabinetry, and that polished stone face is exactly what this room needed.

We do this kind of work all over Neptune Beach and the surrounding Jacksonville area. See more of our TV entertainment center builds here. If you have an outdated fireplace or want a custom built-in wall that actually does something for your living room, reach out to AVP Construction JAX INC. Right here in 32266, doing it right the first time. 🙏

Ready for Your Own Fireplace Makeover in Neptune Beach?

If you are sitting on an old wood-burning fireplace that you never use and a living room wall that could be so much more, we know exactly what to do with it. Give us a call and let us talk through what your space could look like.