fireplace: to open or not to open...
I am SO sorry for the very late reply. Cate: Thank you thank you thank you for posting all the links and photos. It is hugely helpful and I am better understanding what the potential is. I LOVE the mantel you found at Build it Green. And that kind of price is totally doable for something that really makes a statement. I’ve posted another photo of the mantel in what will be the very small kid’s bedroom. I think the shelves are wood, but I’ll have to take another look. I am totally convinced now after reading everyone’s posts that we should not remove the fireplaces at all and instead open them up, see what we have, and either install a new mantle or rehab what’s there. We actually have 6 fireplaces in the house – one in each of the front rooms and one in each of the backrooms. It’s tempting to open them all up! I’m thinking maybe we can put our bed in front of our bedroom’s fireplace, but will have to see if the head of a queen sized bed will fit nicely there. (we’re going to have closets flank each side of that fireplace) As for the tin ceilings – we won’t be doing down lights – I actually don’t like those so much, and my husband prefers using lamps anyway. So we’ll just use a single light fixture in the center of each room, w/ some island lighting in the kitchen. Now I just have to make sure our contractor is on board with this! williamsburgguys: love your tin ceilings. I can’t tell which is new vs original – kudos! 🙂
ps158
in Chimney and Fireplace 10 years and 8 months ago
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ps158 | 10 years and 8 months ago
Looking for some input of what we might find if we open up a closed-up fireplace. I don’t know anything about the anatomy of a fireplace or at all what to expect. At first we were thinking about completely removing the fireplaces on all 3 floors (same stack) to recapture more floor area in each of those rooms, but I’m thinking the expense might be too much to justify the little floor space we’ll get. (Hurts, because we really could use that floor space…) But now I’m wondering if it’s worth it to expose them for decorative purposes? It’s a 3 story (plus basement) wood-frame house. There’s no more chimney at the top of the house where this stack is, so I assume it was removed when the fireplaces were closed up. I’m intrigued about whether or not something beautiful could be behind there, or if it will simply be something utilitarian and boring, or maybe it’s not worth the risk (could we be opening up a can of worms…) Can anyone ballpark what it could cost? Should we just leave it be? Would love hear your thoughts… Attached are a couple of photos…One fireplace is in the kitchen behind the range, and the other is on the 2nd floor in a small bedroom.
rh | 10 years and 8 months ago
First of all, I love your kitchen! Whatever you do, that tin ceiling and wall, the cabinets and floor are all keepers! It would be a great expense to make them working fireplaces, but if you want to use them for decorative purposes and gain floor space, you’re talking about some demo and repair on the wooden mantels, which don’t look like anything special. As far as removing the brick as shown in the kitchen, that may prove to be too much of a project just to gain a few inches of floor space. To me, it doesn’t look like there’s an elaborate mantel behind those bricks….just not enough space. I could be wrong. You can take away the stove portion of the bricks (support it structurally!) and move the stove back. If you want beautiful mantels, get them at a salvage place. Just because they’re not in the house doesn’t mean you can’t put them back.
ps158 | 10 years and 8 months ago
I love the tin ceilings too. We’re fighting for those but several GCs we’ve brought in for estimates have told us it might be too difficult to keep due to all the re-wiring that needs to be done. I don’t know if I love the tin walls though to be honest, and would be fine letting those go… Hadn’t thought about getting a mantel to install – that’s an interesting idea…
cate | 10 years and 8 months ago
I love the kitchen too and agree you can lose the tin on the wall. Later today when I have more time I will try to post some photos showing what the two fireplaces probably looked like originally. . You might encounter rubble, a missing floor, or perfectly intact fireboxes. You likely won’t find a mantel on the kitchen level because these fireplaces had stoves built into them. (Sometimes there was a simple mantel shelf made of slate above the opening.) . Your bedroom mantel is intact and charming. The photo is unclear (only a sliver loaded) but it looks like maybe a wood shelf over a faux painted slate mantel? I would paint it a nice color. Or you could strip the wood and/or the slate. It’s a charming focal point and will make the room. . You can purchase a salvage summer cover insert to cover the hole, open the hole, do both, or cover with an antique or homemade fire screen. . It won’t cost much to open the holes and get them looking presentable, but you should definitely use a fireplace chimney expert. This is not a DIY. It is very messy and dirty also. Check the forum for recs — there is a fellow who specializes in antique mantels and chimney restoration. . To restore and get it all working again would probably cost over $3,000, since you have to reline the chimney, fix the fireboxes, and perhaps rebuild the top of the chimney as well.
cate | 10 years and 8 months ago
BTW we were able to rewire our kitchen (and the whole house) and leave the tin ceiling in the kitchen intact, so it is possible. What exactly are you looking to do?
cate | 10 years and 8 months ago
P.S. Hard to estimate cost of opening boxes and making look pretty, since we don’t know condition. Opening the box takes but a few minutes (plus all the prep to protect the room!). We rebuilt the floor of one of our boxes for $600\. Bet that would cost much, much less if part of a bigger job. To give another ballpark figure, we removed one mantel and installed another, then re-closed the box for $800\.
williamsburgguys | 10 years and 8 months ago
We opened all 4 sealed fireplaces in our house, found appropriate looking but modern tiles and bought the iron surrounds off ebay. Then we found two authentic original style antique oak mantles at the local Brooklyn junk stores, one off Craiglist, and one and from a house down the block who was removing theirs to throw away – none of which were more than a couple hundred dollars. I did have to strip the old paint, refinish, and have one of the mirrors replated. Easy to do in the back yard with a can of Strypeze and some minwax stain. I might have spent $50 total for all 4 to refinish, plus a day or two of time for each one. Our chimneys are all open, but the fireplaces not functional for wood or coal. When we opened them we found piles of leaves 2 feet deep in each one. As for use, they really make the rooms look authentic, which is what we were going for. They also sell alcohol gel log sets that only give off water vapor and are so low heat you can burn the gel in a container on your coffee table. They even work on sealed fireplaces as they are decorative for the most part. We bought those alcohol gel logs for every room so around Christmas at parties we fire them up for the effect. We got the log sets from walmart.com and also the little tins of alcohol gel by the case as well. Makes a nice ambiance for about 4 hours and no smell or danger to the old bricks.
williamsburgguys | 10 years and 8 months ago
Here are the parlor floor fireplaces after opening. I think they make the rooms. Prior, they were simply blank walls jutting out awkwardly into the room.
rh | 10 years and 8 months ago
Well, if you’re removing that wall, give it to me! I have a couple of slate mantels in the shop that totally need stripping. I’ll trade! 😉
williamsburgguys | 10 years and 8 months ago
The kitchen FP was already open and an old Chocolate brown range and some really bad stick on metal tile from the 70’s was there. This is what we did with it. I almost wish we had replastered the brick, but we went with leaving it exposed. The old plaster was in bad shape so we simply chipped it off and sealed the brick with water based poly. I have since added a stainless spice rack which mostly hides that bottom area all the way across the lower brick.
resident2 | 10 years and 8 months ago
I think it is a great shame to buy an old house with original detail, just to rip it all out. It is an Antique for heavens sake, irreplaceable and that is the long term value of it. If you just create a generic box you will have nothing special when it comes time to sell or rent it out. The kitchen hearth probably does have space behind the early 1900’s tin wall closing up where the hearth and range (stove) original was. As williamsburgguys have attached a picture. You may find the original range, although not likely as it appears too flush to the wall. The upstairs bedroom mantels, as others have suggested, strip them, perhaps take the center out to see if you have original tile and the firebox still in place but if you still feel they take up too much space, then but the bed in front of them and you have a built in place to put all your “bedside” nick-naks. To say that you can always put the original detail back, is not really true to the Antiques purist, you can always tell that it is either not correct to the period or just plan fake! Its like those plastic ceiling medallions or polystyrene cove moldings .. disgusting!
ps158 | 10 years and 8 months ago
Cate – would love to see a photo of what it may have originally looked like. This would be a part of a bigger job, so the place is going to messy anyway – perfect time to do it. Thanks for the figures – that’s helpful and sounds doable. RE: the re-wiring. We’re re-wiring the entire house – 3 floors plus a cellar. I know it can be done, but my hunch is the GCs that have looked at it are might not want to be liable if they mess it up, so they set the expectations low…That or maybe they’re lazy. I don’t know. The tin ceilings on the 2nd floor are incredible, and I will shed a few tears if we can’t keep those… The job we’re doing isn’t a full gut, but probably pretty close. We’re not taking down all the walls – just the ones we want to move around to change the layout. We’re also not re-doing all the plumbing – just the plumbing that needs to be done.
ps158 | 10 years and 8 months ago
williamsburgguys: the stockings alone have sold me! The fireplace in the bedroom is going to be one of the kids’ bedrooms, and it’s the smaller of the two rooms…But perhaps it’ll even the playing field, at least at Christmas time, if the kid that ends up in the small room can have playdates w/ Santa 😉 Thanks for sharing the photos, I’m totally sold on opening them up now!
ps158 | 10 years and 8 months ago
so wait – really stupid question…is there definitely brick behind the tin wall? That alone would make me want to open it up. There’s no exposed brick in the house at all right now, and that would really make the room feel cozy!
williamsburgguys | 10 years and 8 months ago
We bought all our fill-ins, repairs, and even the entire basement ceiling tin from Tin Ceiling Express online at a very decent price – what I would consider cheap – and screwed in 1x3s on a 12″ center and nailed up the tin ourselves. It was easy. I think we did the entire basement remodel, in real tin, prob a 19 x 35 ft area, for less than $1000\. They have every pattern out there that was in use in the 1800’s. We painted them with thick roll on paint after priming them, and now you cant tell what was old tin and what is new.
williamsburgguys | 10 years and 8 months ago
Here are 3 examples of our house’s tin. The small bedroom tin is 100% new using old patterns. The dining room is 100% old. The parlor is half new and half old as we took out a wall and had to fill in. Can you tell any difference in the tin?
williamsburgguys | 10 years and 8 months ago
There would definitely be brick behind that kitchen wall fireplace – covered most likely by plaster with broken edges around where they removed the old brickset hearth. Chipping off the plaster is messy, but easy and a hammer and thick scraper/chisel. Vacuum off the remaining dust, then brush on a quart of water based polyurethane. Probably where the old hearth opening was is either a filled in brick wall or maybe even a wooden makeshift wall of some sort. We experienced both here – a couple fireplaces simply had plywood and sheetrock over them, one they had filled in with a really bad brick job then covered with thick beadboard. The kitchen hearth was already open with the old range inside.
cate | 10 years and 8 months ago
Williamsburgguys, they don’t have our pattern. I don’t which room is which in the photos you posted above, but the tin in the red room looks old to me and the tin in the other two rooms looks new to me. Am I right?
cate | 10 years and 8 months ago
I’m going to post a series of photos here. This one shows our kitchen fireplace in 2012\. It is not open. However, it gives you an idea of what the hearth looks like. The top of the chimney is plastered, and I’m sure always was. Then there is a slate mantel. Below the slate the mantel, the two legs of the chimney are brick and were always natural red brick, although unfortunately someone painted them so I did too. Inside the actual fireplace itself would have been red brick as well. Ours is covered with a piece of metal painted white. Just as a point of interest, our kitchen was originally painted darkish green (not pine, exactly — Calke Green on the Farrow & Ball color chart). The bead board all around was fir and stained dark brown. I am not completely sure, but I suspect the dish cupboard was faux painted (and slightly transparent) to look like oak. Quite a lot going on here. So although the kitchen is dark, the red and green would have been a little bit jaunty. It’s possible the floor was just the fir boards, but doubtful. They may have had some crazy Victorian pattern linoleum — or that pattern that looks like rough tile, which has been in production since linoleum was invented. We have bits of it (from a later era) under various floor coverings. The only light in the room was one J-shaped gas sconce hanging in the corner over the sink. And of course they would have had lamps. You can also see the tin ceiling. The off center hole in the sort of middle of the room was already there. Our electricians added the two holes over the sink and another hole over the fridge for more light fixtures. The fireplace could have held a built-in range or a stove. The difference is that the stove would be freestanding in the fireplace, sitting on the slate hearth, and a pipe would go up the chimney from the back of the stove. I would like to strip the brick to get back to the original red brick. (BTW our kitchen is circa 1892.)