Firewood Box and Barn Bench

Between building the goat barn and repairing the pantry roof, the pile of leftover wood scraps has become pretty large. Add to that a couple of rainy days, and this is what happens.

A new firewood box! The old one was small and rickety, so Dan wanted to make a new one. What's nifty about this one is that it has wheels and a handle.

It can be wheeled out to the front porch where the outdoor rack is and load it up. No more leaving the front door open in frigid temperatures while we carry in armloads of wood to refill it. 

 Dan also made a barn bench!

Rustic, heavy duty, and Meowy approved.

This was made from waste slabs of wood from Dan's sawmill. For every post, beam, or board he cuts, there are a number of pieces that are too irregular for regular building projects, but are still useful.

We're entering the season of small projects, because often that's all the weather will allow. It's also a good time to plan ahead, research, write, and do some creative experimentation. Not to mention enjoying a bowl of soup by the wood fire! We have to appreciate these things in their appropriate seasons, don't we?

Firewood Box and Barn Bench © November 2018 

by Leigh at http://www.5acresandadream.com/

Woodstove In! Alcove Done! (Well, Almost)

(Continued from here.) Except for a few finishing details, the stove is in and the alcove is done.

(You can click on most of these images to enlarge a little)

This is a Woodstock Soapstone woodstove, made of cast iron and soapstone.

It has a double paned ceramic glass "airwash" window in front for soot free fire watching.

It is side loading.

Soapstone is commonly used for kitchen countertops and sinks, because it is stain resistant. It's also used in woodstoves and fireplaces because of it's ability to absorb and distribute heat evenly. It has natural heat retention, which means it can radiate heat even after the fire has gone out.

This stove is also equipped with a catalytic combustor ...

... which burns particulate emissions from the wood, as well as exhaust gases such as carbon monoxide, methane, benzene, etc. Besides the environmental benefit of this, the catalytic combustor converts these to heat energy, increasing the stove's heating efficiency. A load of wood typically will burn for ten to twelve hours, meaning they only need to be loaded about twice a day! An added bonus is that with an EPA emission rating of only 1.3 grams/hour, these stoves qualify for an energy tax credit.

I also ordered a cooktop for it. This is an extra piece of soapstone which fits on top of the stove. You can see mine on the right. It cuts the temperature on top by approximately half, making it possible to cook directly on top of the stove.

We were fortunate to get this stove during a clearance sale, and also got a big shipping discount. This is our primary heat source, so the investment was worth it to us. It is replacing this....

... an oil burning furnace which neither of us likes the idea nor the smell of. And especially not it's using oil. It is combined with the AC unit, which we did use some this past summer.

The woodstove should heat most of the house, except perhaps the addition at the very back of the house (see floorplan). However, we are contemplating making that back room (currently the office) into a larger food storage area instead, which will benefit from cooler temperatures. Both bathrooms however, will probably require consideration for supplemental heat at times.

To see the living room "before," as well as a photo journal of how we got from there to here, you can check out the following links:

• Bad News About The Fireplace - why did it & before photo
• Removing The Chimney - 1st post in that series
• The New Hearth - 1st post in that series
• Completing The Alcove - the 1st post in that series starts here

So, what's left to be done?

• Put moulding on the very bottom to cover the concrete slab under the bricks. We decided to wait until after we refinished the living room floor to do that.
• Fill in the "cracks" between the top row of bricks and cement board, and the bricks and moulding on the side.
• Paint the living room walls and all moulding.
• Sand and refinish the hardwood floor.
• We also need to cure the stove, which we will do this weekend when the temperature dips

Thanks to the limbs that were trimmed from our two old oaks, we have plenty of firewood...

As you can well imagine, getting to this point is quite a relief.

Woodstove In! Alcove Done! (Well, Almost) copyright

October 2009 by Leigh at http://www.5acresandadream.com/

Woodstove Alcove: The Home Stretch!

Continued from here.

Because of it's construction, the cement board did not have a paintable surface texture. DH covered it with tileset mortar, smoothed it, and sanded it after it dried.

I painted the walls and ceiling, and DH put the vents in.

Then he cleaned the bricks with muriatic acid and a lot of elbow grease. This is rather nasty stuff which requires care to handle, but it does remove dried mortar from brick surfaces.

Then (with a neighbor's help), we brought the woodstove in.

Drumroll please ..... (click here.)

Can you believe we're almost done with this project?

Woodstove Alcove: The Home Stretch! photos and text copyright October 2009 by Leigh at http://my5acredream.blogspot.com/

Related Posts:
Bad News About The Fireplace - why we're doing this & before photo
Removing The Chimney - 1st post in that series
The New Hearth - 1st post in that series
Completing The Alcove - the 1st post in that series starts here

Woodstove Alcove: Ceiling & Cement Board

Continued from here.

Once the brick hearth was laid (see link above), we needed to finish off the top half of the alcove.

The ceiling went in first. We used firewall rated drywall. It was no more expensive than the standard mid-grade drywall, and we felt better using that.

The stovepipe ceiling support went in next. Dan also added additional framing for the cement board.

Cement board is commonly used in bathrooms, because it is mildew, moisture, and mold resistant. It is usually covered with tile. It is also used for heat shields for woodstoves.

It required a masonry saw blade to cut it, and had to be attached with cement board screws. It comes in 3 by 5 foot sheets. We used four for the upper alcove walls.

The cut-out rectangles at the top are to accommodate wall vents for the ventilated air space behind the cement board and bricks. This is explained in this post, and enables us to place the woodstove closer to the alcove walls.

Next came taping the seams...

This required a fiberglass tape and tileset mortar. Dan also trimmed and smoothed the rough cut edges of the alcove opening, and filled them in as well. Once it's dry, we can move on to the next steps: preparing the cement board for paint and cleaning the bricks. It feels like we're finally heading into the home stretch (click here to see that)!

Woodstove Alcove: Ceiling & Cement Board photos & text copyright 

October 2009 by Leigh at http://www.5acresandadream.com/

The New Hearth - Finishing The Brickwork

Well, finished for now anyway. Dan has built it up from the first course of bricks, to as high as we are going to go to create our woodstove alcove.

While Dan did the mortaring, I helped prepare the bricks.

First they are soaked in water for 45 minutes.

Then they are allowed to dry, but just until the surface moisture evaporated off. After that they were ready for the mortar.

Dan found it a real challenge to keep everything squared and level, especially considering the irregularities of our old bricks.


Wire mesh is used as wall ties every three courses of bricks.

This is almost the same height that the living room fire place was.

Here's what it looks like from the backside, from the bedroom fireplace...

The brick still needs to be cleaned off after the mortar has had a chance to cure.

The next step will be finishing off the upper part of the alcove (continue on to that post here.) After that the stove can go in! Hopefully just before our first frost!

The New Hearth - Finishing The Brickwork text & photos copyright 

September 2009 by Leigh at http://www.5acresandadream.com/

The New Hearth - Laying the 1st Course

Well, technically we've begun phase 3 of our hearth project, which is bricking up a portion of the alcove for the woodstove. That is going to take some time, so this post is to give you a peek at our start.

Dan volunteered to lay the brick, so I volunteered to clean them.


Considering that most of them were encrusted with the old mortar, it actually wasn't too bad of a job. That mortar was so soft that it mostly crumbled off (which was the reason we had to tear down the chimney and fireplace in the first place.) It took me a day and a half to do about 200 bricks. As I worked with them, I was fascinated to see the personality these old bricks have; being handmade, each one is truly unique.

I was especially pleased with how many different colors there are...


... everything from terra cotta, to almost purplish. And, being the brick cleaner, I got to choose which colors we would use. Eventually they will all be used for various projects around the place, but for the woodstove alcove, I liked the darker ones best (as I think they will match my dark cherry living room furniture best.)

For the first course however, we used something different.



There were about a dozen or so of these bricks with holes in them lying around the place. They were the perfect solution to an issue we had to resolve, that of clearances.

Anyone who has ever had a woodstove is familiar with clearances. Even so, common sense would tell us that one can't place an iron box full of burning wood too close to things that might catch fire. But, since not everyone has common sense, there are codes to cover this sort of thing, i.e. how close a woodburning stove can be to any given wall.

There are a number of options to bring clearances up to code. The simplest is distance, by placing the back of the stove 30 inches, and the sides 18 inches, from a combustible wall. In our case however, the back of the alcove isn't combustible, as it's the back of the brick fireplace in our bedroom. The wood walls on the sides however, were a consideration. The alcove created by tearing down the chimney breast didn't give us the clearance room we needed using distance alone.

The clearance can be decreased to 14 inches on the sides, with a brick wall against a combustible wall. But by adding a one inch ventilated air space between the wood and the brick, the clearance distance can be reduced to 7 inches. This we could do.

Creating a ventilated masonry wall, requires vents at both bottom and top of the wall to allow for air circulation behind the wall. Those holey bricks will serve as the bottom vents for this. In addition, Dan did not put mortar between the bricks on the bottom course, except in the corners for wall stability.

The plan is to brick the alcove to about the same height as the fireplace, add a brick ledge, and then finish the top of the alcove with mineral (cement) board. We won't have the same clearance issue to deal with at that height, but we wanted the extra measure of safety the mineral board will provide. I'm going to look for some fancy air vents to set into the top of the mineral board to complete our ventilated air space. The stove pipe will be double walled up to the ceiling. From the ceiling on up through the roof, we will use prefabricated metal chimney pipe UL Type HT class A, approved to 2100° F. This will bring the entire system up to code.

And last but not least, for those of you who have been wondering if Rascal has to snoopervise every aspect of every project, the answer is ...

YES!

Next - Finishing The Brickwork

The New Hearth - Laying the 1st Course is copyright
(both text & photos) 

Sept. 2009 by Leigh at http://www.5acresandadream.com/

The New Hearth - Phase 2

In the comments of The New Hearth - Phase 1, Dorothy asked about what was underneath the new slab. This is a good question, and I can tell you that we poured it over the old concrete hearth, which was built directly on the ground when the house was built. If we had to put it on top of wood flooring, we would have had to take extra measures to protect the floor from heat.

While the concrete was curing, we discussed options about what to put on top of it, such as tile, stone, or brick. True to our "use it up / make it do" mindset, the only answer in the end was to reuse the chimney and fireplace brick we had just taken down....

This brick is original to the house, which was built in the 1920s, so it is 80 years old at least. It was not made with modern methods, and so the bricks are not uniform in size. We have two different types....

This is the cross section of one of the handmade ones. The clay was rolled into shape and put into a mold just like kneaded bread dough in a bread pan.

This one was likely made by a machine which pressed out long ribbons of clay, which were cut into the individual bricks. If you are interested in more detail about how bricks used to be made, you can read it here, at How Bricks Were Made

Anyway, back to our project. The first step was to decide on a pattern for the bricks...

The second step was to "glue" the bricks in place with a masons mix.

Finally mortar was applied to fill in the spaces between the bricks.

An hour later, DH scraped the excess off with a trowel. Three hours after that, a stiff brush was used to remove even more. The last step will be to use a brick & mortar cleaner to remove any mortar remaining on the brick surfaces themselves. We plan to finish all the brick work first however, and then clean it all at the same time.
Theresa asked what kind of wood stove we have. It's a Woodstock Soapstone stove, and we definitely plan to have it in before it starts to get chilly at night! :)

Next - the step we didn't plan on.

Photos & text of The New Hearth - Phase 2 are copyright 

September 2009 by Leigh at http://www.5acresandadream.com/

The New Hearth - Phase 1

It's been awhile since I've mentioned anything about our chimney/fireplace project. It's not that we haven't been working on it; it's just that re-building anything seems to take so much more time than tearing a thing down. Over the next couple of posts however, I will show you how far we've actually gotten over the past two months.

By the end of my last post about it, the fireplace looked like this ....

Originally we thought we'd leave the back, red brick wall of the original fireplace intact. We thought we could fill it in to line the alcove after we laid a new hearth.

In discussing this and trying to think it though, it made more sense to take all of it down and start the whole thing from the bottom course of bricks. Once the back of the fireplace was removed, it looked like this ....

The brickwork you do see, is the back of the fireplace in our bedroom, which remain as a facade for the time being. The vertical 2x4 is there as a temporary support, because this is a load bearing wall. That meant that the first order of business was to support it with new framing and a double header.

During this step, we (actually I should say DH because I am not a carpenter) also put the stove & chimney pipe support in place, as you can see above.

The base of the original hearth was uneven. Because we are going to put a woodburning heater here, we need it to be as even and level as possible. To do that we needed to pour a new base.

First DH framed it out. Next he applied a concrete bonding adhesive to the old concrete, to ensure that it would bond to the new.

We used a pre-packaged concrete mix, mixing it a bag at a time in a wheelbarrow...

... and pouring it into the frame....


After 24 hours, DH removed the framing.

The longer concrete takes to cure, the stronger it is, so we kept it damp for about a week. Information sources vary quite a bit on this step, but we did it just the same.

The next step will be a top layer of bricks. Click here to see that.

Photos and text of The New Hearth - Phase 1 are copyright

September 2009 by Leigh at http://www.5acresandadream.com/

Removing The Chimney - Phase 3

Once we finished taking the chimney down from the top (click here for that) and through the attic floor (and click here to see that), it was time to move inside. First thing to come down was the mantle ....

Then the chimney breast ...

And then it was time to tear into the wall....



Until we got to this point....

This is where we are at the moment. The grate that you see is actually for the fireplace in the bedroom. You can also see the black plastic I hung behind that. If you click on the photo below, you can get a closer look....

Removing the fireplace created a little alcove, which will accommodate the stove. The chimney pipe will run up through the old masonry chimney opening. However, the concrete slab is uneven, which won't do for a woodburning stove. So we need to re-do the hearth, and figure out how we want to finish off the wall and ceiling. So we're in a planning phase at the moment. Once we decide on all that, we'll be back at it, and I'll have more photos for you then. [ UPDATE: Click here, to see what we decided and how we're doing it.]

Removing The Chimney- Phase 3 copyright July 2009 

by Leigh at http://www.5acresandadream.com/