It wasn't very long after we bought our house in 2005 that my partner started lobbying for putting a fireplace in the living room. I was in favor of the idea. There was an obvious place to put it (the wall that the living room shares with the garage). My partner started doing research on zero-clearance wood stoves, which are wood stoves designed to be installed in a wall such that they look like fireplaces. Because he was the one most keen to see a fireplace in the living room, I left him with the task of putting the various pieces together, though I would end up paying for most of it, since my paycheck is bigger than his.
Well, it's taken years, but the fireplace project is very close to completion...
(Jump over the doodle-thingie for more.)
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So, why did it take so long for this project to get off the ground? Two reasons. First, there were several more urgent remodeling issues, specifically, the kitchen, both bathrooms, refinishing all the floors, replacing all the windows, the roof, the soffits, and construction of a back deck.
The second reason had to do with the difficulty associated with actually finding someone who would sell us the sort of stove we wanted. This task turned out to be more difficult than you might have thought. There are several business establishments in our region (northwestern Pennsylvania) that ostensibly sell zero-clearance wood stoves, but when you go to such businesses and announce your intentions, the salesmen (and they are all men) are determined to tell you that that isn't what you really want. They try to steer you toward pellet stoves, or gas fireplaces (even after being told that the gas line doesn't reach our house in the country). Even if, by some miracle, these salesmen were to reluctantly grant that, yes, if you really wanted a wood-burning stove, yeah, they could sell you one, why would you want to buy something from an obnoxious, patronizing and ignorant salesman who has labored to put up every possible roadblock between you and what you want?
At some point, I brought up the desire to find a zero-clearance wood stove in one of Frankenoid's Saturday Morning Garden Blogs, and tobendaro stepped up and suggested we look at a business in nearby western New York State. (By the way, we later met tobendaro in reality, and we've become good friends.) It took years to follow through, but this past fall, we went out to New York and, within an hour, made a deal for a zero-clearance stove. Unlike the other businesses we went to, the guy in New York treated us with respect.
Next came logistics and planning. The stove guy would install the stove, but a contractor would be needed to build a support and housing for the stove, and a chase for the chimney. Our regular contractor was booked solid, so we hired the contractor recommended by the stove guy. In addition to that, we wanted the region around the stove to be tiled, and we have had all of our tiling done by the cousin of a colleague of mine. He's a bit chaotic, but he does superb work.
Our hope was to complete the project before the worst part of the winter came, since it would be a bit of a problem to have a hole in the living room wall once winter hit full-on. Of course, this year, winter never achieved its usual brutality, and given how things developed, it's a good thing it didn't. The original plan was to get the construction of the base, housing and chase done immediately after Thanksgiving. Then the stove guy would come in and install the unit. The tile guy would install the tile, and the contractor would come back and complete the housing and the trim, all in about three weeks.
Heh.
The contractor rolled in and put up the base, the housing and the chase, and cut the hole in the wall for the unit (covering it with cardboard) in about two or three days. Then the stove guy rolled in to install the stove...and discovered that the base was built too low, and the housing for the unit did not have the specified dimensions. So...the contractor had to come back to fix his errors before the stove could be installed, but in the meantime (of course), he was busy on other jobs. We had left for the holidays before he could get to it. And all this time, we had only a piece of holey cardboard between the living room and the garage.
It took a couple of weeks in January to work out solutions the problems, but eventually, we did get the stove installed, the tile layed, the mantle mounted, and the trim replaced. There remain a few details to be attended to, but we are now enjoying fires in our new fireplace, and my partner is very happy. Here's what it looks like:
The stove itself is made by Valcourt, in Quebec, Canada. The air for combustion is drawn from outdoors so as not to send warm air from inside the house up the chimney. It has a secondary burner for efficiency. The window is ceramic glass that can take quite a bit of heat, and there is a thermostated fan that circulates air in the room around the stove once the stove gets hot enough.
The tiles were purchased from a company in Minnesota called Clay Squared to Infinity. I stole the tiling pattern off of a website somewhere, but modified it slightly. My partner and I negotiated on tile colors and color pattern.
The bits that remain to be done are caulking between the tile and the mantle, some details with the plaster, and then painting. I'm afraid we will have to repaint the entire living room, and possibly down the hallway as well, but it has been 7 years since we last painted.
There are still more home remodeling projects to be done around here, but I think this is all I can afford this year.
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February 15, 2012
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