Wood Stove Project

In November, we started our fireplace construction project.  We ripped out the old gas fireplace in our living room and replaced it with a new wood-burning stove. 

The BEFORE picture.  I love that mantel! Don't love the brick, but I do miss having my family picture up there.

Goodbye beautiful mantel! I still miss you!

See that red blanket stuck into that hole? Yeah, it was letting a steady breeze of cold air into our house.  There was another hole behind that white plate higher on the wall too.  That was a bit of extra work to patch those before we started putting up rock.

 It was more of an undertaking than we originally anticipated, but it was worth it.  We had to patch some holes that were hidden behind the old corner fireplace, we had to chip out the existing brick shelves, we had to deal with running the chimney pipe and where that was going to make it work with the existing vent holes in our roof, we covered all the existing brick with some nice Harristone rock, and had to have new mantel shelves made since we lost our old mantel (which I loved and was so sad to lose).  Not to mention Rob did a great job on tiling the hearth!

Tile's done!

Midway through the rock process.  We decided to do dry stack on the rock, because we like the look of it better.

I did about 80% of the rock--it is kind of like putting a puzzle together, trying to get all the pieces to work with each other and NOT look like a pattern.  And if you know me, you know I love puzzles!

And after about a month from start to finish, it was finally done!! Drumroll please......

The AFTER picture

It's finally done!! What a relief to have my living room back!

During the day with natural light

 We love love love our wood stove! It cuts down on our utility bill by about $200 a month, and actually keeps us WARM instead of us being not-quite-warm enough to be comfortable.  It has been a bit of a learning curve learning how to deal with the ins and outs of starting a fire every day, but definitely worth it! We love how it turned out.