Create a renter friendly holiday mantel with a faux fireplace surround, space heater, and appropriate decor. Find creative rental friendly solutions for the season!

Greetings friends!  One more Christmas post before the big day.  We usually keep seating in our foyer but recently we found a MDF fireplace mantel at a gift shop and decided to bring it home.  You might have spotted it on Instagram. It’s a little hard to wrap our heads around the winter season living on a sub-tropical island, but this little mantel does a lovely job reminding us.

A Renter Friendly Holiday Mantel

A basket full of lights and pine stems are all we need in this warm weather.  If it actually gets cold, we’ll purchase a space heater to sit in it’s place.  The pine stems were from the local dollar store.

My talented friend Aniko, from Place of My Taste has beautiful watercolors.  The Christmas deer she is offering as a gift to email subscribers (wink, wink).   You might recognize the white birch trees from Minted.com and I just printed off one of this year’s Marine Corps ball pictures.  If you haven’t seen my updated dollar tree nativity set, you can read all about it HERE.

I purchased my first bottle brush tree last week and the little geometrical vase came from Tokyo.  You can read how I created the winter dollar store eucalyptus wreath HERE.

Chikyu is our Okinawan water buffalo.  He’s one of my favorite souvenirs from here.  I found him at a local import store.  We actually have water buffalo on the island so I was excited to find him for decor.

For a little comparison, here was the foyer before… 

and our Christmas foyer now. 

Love that I can move this mantel around during the year!

Head over to the winter holidays, DIYs, and decor page for more articles and resources!

Toodles,

P.S How’s your elf doing?