First Floor Fireplace

Work began today on the first floor front room fireplace. This will be the most important fireplace in the house, in that it will be located in the living room and will be in constant use so will be important to get right.

This was the fireplace as it stood, looking very sorry for itself:

As you can see, the opening is tiny (approx 10" deep and about double that in width at its widest) and is of little use in it's current form. The plan was to widen the opening considerably so a solid fuel burning stove can be inserted, which will heat both the living room and provide heating to the water in the 200l thermal stove, located in the attic space.

It's likely that this wasn't the original opening size, as once the area was opened up, the original brick casing became clear, whilst the inside of the opening was filled with miscellaneous stone/brick rubble to pad out the space for the smaller grate that was installed.

Space was first created above the opening to insert a new head. Already you can see the opening is clear of rubble:

After many hours work, this was the finished result:

The left side wall of the fireplace had to be rebuilt as there was little to work with. Salvaged red brick was used to complete the wall. The fireplace is also inherently off center due to the flue rising from the floor below traversing the other side of the rebuilt left side wall.

The flues are really quite over-sized despite the modest proportions of the house; you could stand up inside them with a bit of squeezing.

I opted for a Henley Druid 21KW stove with backboiler. It supplies 8KW of heat to the room and a further 13KW to water. It has something of an understated style which I liked:

The resulting rubble:

An 1820s fireplace surround is being sourced from Dublin this week, more updates very soon.

Ground Floor Works - Small Update

I neglected to take any recent pictures of the completed ground floor limecrete slabs, but three weeks on and it's drying well. It takes a long time to dry out, especially at this time of year, with damp areas still concentrated around wall areas. However the floor has been solid for approx two weeks now and can be treaded across with no problems.

Some areas are covered in board to protect the surface.

Some better pictures coming soon.

The rear of the house has been scaffolded for the second time, in preparation of the lining of the flues. Six inch stainless steel flexi-liners will be dropped down two flues, one to the ground floor front room fireplace and the other to the first floor front room fireplace.