Building A New Fireplace

Last week was another hard one, made worse by the fact I broke my toe! I just limped a bit - it was only my little one thankfully!

It was finally time to tackle the fireplace!

A little bit of me has always hated this old open fireplace. We used to hide it with an old bookcase I made my wife for Christmas years ago.

Trouble was it was built with the same iron hard bricks and mortar as the rest of the house - not easy to take down I can tell you!

Floating Oak Mantle Piece

A picture heavy post sorry and one repeated from my other blog.
This is our own mantle piece in our living room. It's been on my "to-do" list for quite some time!
Who says the clobbers children go bare foot! They just have to do without for a little while!

The top of our fireplace looked like this all winter, so it was time to make it look a little neater!

Plywood template made up the exact same size as the oak.
This is so holes could be accurately drilled and match up between the wall and the piece of oak

Fixing the template to the wall. Making sure it's level

The stainless steel threaded bar fixed into the wall. The holes behind are a couple of mil bigger to allow for the resin to fix the bar. 

Using a template in this way means that the bar will be in exactly the right place. I used the nut to make sure it was the right distance out from the wall.

The three pieces of threaded bar resined into the wall. The middle one is purely to locate the oak and to stop it from warping.

The underside of the two ends.
The oak is then tighten to the wall making it very strong. This hole will eventually be filled with a Walnut plug for a contrast - If you can't hide something then make a feature of it!

A good spanner had to die to fix it though, as a normal one wouldn't fit in the hole! 

The finished mantle piece

The mantle piece looks quite modern but, in my opinion, goes well with our fireplace, giving it a good mix of the traditional materials with the sharp lines of the rest the fireplace.

New Fire

Well it's getting colder so the last couple of nights we've had the wood burning stove going and we're impressed.

It gets up to temperature easily, lights easily and really heats up the room. Most nights we're only burning around three small logs and that's giving us heat from 7 till 11, on the open fire we would have burned a whole basket full of wood and received 10% of the heat!
We've not had the central heating on yet and with the use of this stove it should help us keep it off for a little while yet!
Who else is keeping the central heating off for as long as possible?

Living Room Renovation 3

It's been a while since I've done an update on the living room renovation.

Over the last month I've managed to add some more sockets, remove the wall lights, change the light switch from one side of the door to the other, fit a new lining and rehang the door the other way round.

 

 I then prepared the whole room for being plastered and got my good friend, Sean, in to plaster it for me. This involved painting the walls with a grit and adding some plasterboard back on the ceilings were I'd made holes to get the wires in.

Sean plastering

I've added a lintel over the fire place and then cast a concrete slab to cap it off, I filled void above with bricks. I've given the whole room one coat of paint  and applied some levelling compound to the floor.

Dad on the roof - not a nice day for it!

And to top it all off today we've been on the roof. I managed to rope my dad into helping line the chimney, so today we managed to get the liner in and insulated as well as repair a few broken tiles I had on the roof.
Sorry I've not been blogging or commenting much the last could of weeks but hopefully when it's all finished you should be able to see why. The trouble is my deadline is coming up fast but there's no way of telling when he or she will be born -  I just hope it's all done by then!

Living Room Renovation 2

 Yesterday was like something out of ground force or DIY SOS.

I got up quite early and started doing some jobs to the room like blocking up the holes where the joists used to run. Then around 9.30 all heel broke loose as my reinforcements arrived. Jack hammers breaking out concrete, tractors to lug away the stone, sledge hammers banging. All good fun.

Dad getting carried away with the fireplace

 We managed to take the fireplace right back and put in a duct drawing air from outside to help it draw. Dad kept getting carried away and taking another layer of bricks out each time I left the room. Plenty of scope now with what to put back in there.
We also had to remove the floor in front of the front door due to the way the joists ran and were supported, this meant more concreting but it saves a job later.


Laying the plastic

By 4.30 we'd broken up the floor lab under the old toilet, taken the chimney right back, removed all the rubble, laid a layer of stone, wackered it, added a layer of plastic, put down the kingspan (type) insulation and added another layer of plastic.


No idea whats going on with these last two pictures and I can't get them to turn round!
This one shows the insulation though

A neighbour popped round about then and said "it doesn't look like your get it concreted today then". We did.
The mixer went on at 4.30 and with three wheel barrows and two laying we were all finished by around 8 o'clock. Even I was having my doubts at one point but we all pushed each other on and got the job done. Te mixer on the front of the tractor was helpful as I don't think ready mix would have delivered at that time of day!

Concrete in!

Thanks to all my helpers over the weekend -
Tim and Tom on Saturday
Dad, Ian, Harry and Nick On Sunday.
With ages ranging from 14 to 56 everyone worked hard and really well together. Hopefully it was as enjoyable as concreting can be! Thanks again guys!

Now I've just got to wait a month for it to be dry enough to lay a wood floor on it! Hopefully I'll get the fireplace sorted out in the meantime as well as plastering, plumbing etc.
Anyone else get much done over the weekend?

Living Room Renovation

I was going to title this "Oh my God, what have you done". Which I think is what my wife is thinking.

Before - The old fireplace with it's two wings - made storage difficult in this room

 My projects at home have a habit of escalating. Over the winter we decided that although our open fire place looks nice it's rubbish at keeping us warm. No matter how much wood we chuck on to it, it makes no difference. So we decided that in the summer we would replace it with a wood burning stove.
This is the project I've just started. The trouble is I thought if I'm doing the fireplace I might as well do the skirting and architrave (half of it's missing or doesn't match anyway). Then I thought - well if I'm doing that I might as well do the floor as well. So it becomes a complete refurb job.
The floor is a suspended timber floor and although there's no problems with it structurally, its is cold as the wind blows up and through it making the house tricky to keep warm. I could insulated between the timber joists but the old rat and mice nests under the floor made me think I've made the right decision to insulate and then concrete the floor. Although it's more work it should mean that I never have to do work on this floor again (I know I'll get comments on how I should keep the timber joists in but I've think this is the best in the long term).

After - How to knock money off the value of your house!

Once the concrete has cured and dried I'll lay a oak floor on top and then build in some bookshelves and storage for toys as well as a new fireplace. On top of this I'll change the radiator and all the skirting and architraves. Should keep me busy for a couple of nights!