Hi, everyone. Welcome again to Saturday Morning Home Repair blogging, where we talk about fixing houses, the things in them that are supposed to work for us, and fixing them up. An ad hoc cadre of building professionals and gifted amateurs attempt to answer questions that arise from raiders, and offer encouragement and advice for those inclined to do things for themselves, if they can. We all do a lot of things, collectively, and can probably help out with insights from our vast experience.
Or sometimes, we just gab.
Today's project has to do with something that we've wanted to deal with for the last decade - ever since we moved into the house. It involves this:
Quite something, isn't it? We dubbed it the Camelot stove, for certainly it belonged in the great hall of a fine castle in a perfect land. Sadly, it was built in our 15' x 15' living room and, at around 26 square feet of floor space - well - that's a boatload of real estate in a room that size.
So. Originally last week, we were just going to go for this part:
Those rocks around the front have been a hazard zone FOREVER. We were going to take it all back to just in front of the stove and then lay some nice terracotta tile in front in anticipation of replacing the faux-rock surround with real brick one of these days. But mid black-tile tear-out, we just said, "What the hell!? Let's keep goin'!!"
I'll let the pictures tell the rest.
My brother-in-law pops the first of what we find out are fitted fauxstone caps:
He and MrCJB lift the mesh and poured base:
KidCJB was having a bunch of guys stay over for his 16th birthday, so we had plenty of helpers:
As we left it Saturday night:
Sunday AM. BinL and MrCJB unload the firebricks from the stove:
CJB sez, time for some plastic, gentlemen:
Away goes the pipe:
Out goes the stove (Interesting the MrCJB is blabbing at the camera while everyone else works):
Say. That looks kinda cool. Maybe we should keep it. make an entertainment center out of it:
NAAAAH!! (Please note that little black rectangle above the yellow sledge handle. We'll come back to that.)
Double NAAAAH!!
We have achieved wall:
\
Some final tidying:
Et voila! You'd hardly know it had been there:
36 hours and one full ton of rubble later we can begin to install our new floor this weekend without having to carve our way around Camelot. But that's a story for another diary. ;-)