Hitting a Brick Wall

Our house has three fireplaces - one in the living room, one in the dining room, and one in an upstairs bedroom. We also have brick in the kitchen that used to house the exhaust (or something like that) from the furnace in the basement or a stove. Or something. The brick in the kitchen is painted (insert a groan here...that may be a project for another day).

Upstairs in the sleeping porch, which as I mentioned before has officially become Sagan's playroom (again, a project for another day), the stack from the kitchen downstairs comes up through that room in a corner. We could see the brick at the bottom of the stack, but were unsure if the coating on top of it was helping keep it structurally sound, or if we could remove it. After speaking with a brick mason we determined that it was just to hide the brick and offered no structural support, so we decided to remove it.

So...first things first. David got a hammer and chisel and went at that stack. And, excitingly, there was brick underneath! The brick isn't in the greatest shape so needs a little bit of work, but we'll get to that. One day.

Exciting {albeit messy} progress!

Ta da! We still have some cleanup to do on some of the bricks, but the stack is mostly exposed!

Now, to the living room fireplace. I didn't get the best before photo to show how it was coming apart from the wall, but it was. It looked like the fireplace was not original - that these bricks had been added at some point. 

We talked to a mason who had done work in older and historic homes, and he agreed that this was a new front that had been placed in front of what was likely a larger firebox and a lot of brick. While we removed the sheetrock next to the fireplace where we will add built-ins, we decided to pull down the sheetrock around the fireplace as well. We have plans to eventually fame above the mantle and hang our TV there, so we needed the sheetrock to come down.

Again, there was a hard stucco-like surface. Maybe some kind of concrete board. Regardless, where that met the shiplap on the adjacent wall, there was a small gap where we could see brick was behind that hard surface. 

We contracted with a mason to tackle the project. We were afraid the brick behind this wallboard might not be stable, and didn't want to take any chance that the fireplace might crumble. After the first day of him working on it, we came home to this. I'll admit I was slightly nervous.

Crumbling bricks, ugly white firebox...we weren't sure how this would turn out!

 It took him two days, and we're so pleased with the results. He only had to replace a couple of bricks, he fixed the mortar, and sealed it so they wouldn't be crumbly. 

Muuuuuch better!

Now, this isn't how we plan to leave it. We plan to add a mantle. We had planned on building one, then thought we'd try to find an antique one. After visiting Hailey's Salvage in Nashville yesterday (and finding loads and loads of potentially beautiful mantles), I think we're back to needing to build one. Stay tuned...

We could spend hours here!

So many options, but none just right.

We really liked the details on this one, but the opening wasn't large enough to show enough of the brick around the firebox. So David drew plans and measurements to build something similar to this.