Snug Fireplace

[malcolm]

I am unsure what to do with the fireplace in the snug. Previously it extended too far into the room, so I have removed a number of fireplaces added between 1910 and 1950 to get back to the original opening. The room feels much bigger.

I guess the chimney was built around 1700 judging by the English bond brickwork and the funny size bricks which are roughly metric in width but not as tall. There is no lintel but evidence of a very short lintel with the bearing since filled with quarter bricks.

I want to fit a wood burner in the hole. Ideally I would have preferred to have exposed brick with an arch, but the bricks are in poor condition and the inside corners of the brickwork have been hacked away at some point.

I'm stumped. I've been looking at the internet but current fashion seems to be to plaster and then paste an oak beam in at some unlikely height above the opening and that looks silly. I'm not sure why the fireplace is as it is. Someone must have had a good idea a couple of hundred years ago but I don't know what that was.

What would you do?

 

[plasticpigeon]

Looks about the right size for an insert of some sort. I don't know much about fireplaces from that period, but I get the impression that there was usually an ornamental surround with stone slips within the suround, and a fire basket, perhaps that's what yours had. I don't like wood burners in a rough hole. I think inserts or wood burners always look better with some kind of surround, and not as you say some odd piece of wood looking like a lintel at some random height.

 

[livias]

Have your acros been having babies? I have never seen such tiny ones. Aren't they sweet

 

[malcolm]

I bought the acros for a job further up the same chimney when I was taking the rotten timber frame out, and they came in handy for the kitchen window lintel.

A surround would be sensible. I could fit a lintel and cover it up with a surround. Is a wood surround allowable for building regs? I know a wooden lintel is not allowed.

 

[Flyfisher]

Building regs do not disallow wood surrounds/lintels etc, but they do require specified distances between the stove and any flammable materials. If a wooden lintel is too close to the stove, the regs allow the wood to be covered with non-flammable material.

I can't remember offhand which 'part' of the regs specifies all this but Google will be your friend on this. Might also be some info on the HETAS website.

 

[Zebra]

The picture gets a bit blurry when you zoom in, what is the lintel/bressumer above the opening (on the accros) made of? Is it timber? You say there is no lintel but in the picture it all looks reasonably sturdy. The brickwork doesn't look too shoddy to rescue either. Perhaps I've got my "optimism" setting turned up too high on my phone....
Given that it doesn't look too bad to me, I think I'd be inclined to repoint the brickwork, rescue or replace the lintel/bressumer, and plaster the lighter colour brickwork, leaving the bricks at the sides of the fireplace exposed.

 

[malcolm]

That's not a bad idea. The bricks have had a hard life. Some are spalled and the sides have been knocked off on the inside of the opening. The lintel had very little bearing and I think it was removed by the Edwardians who built an arch very badly. The lintel in the photo is the shadow of the 1950s fireplace.

Having a closer look the bricks are a different size to the tricky to find bricks on the outside wall - they are 65mm x 230mm (outside are 60mm x 220mm) so it would be possible to find replacements that match the rest of the house reasonably well. I guess the Georgians might have rebuilt the fireplace. It looks like 200mm might be the closest wood can be to a fire. Rebuilding the brick would probably be cheaper than a stone surround.

It might well be an idea to rebuild the front face of the fireplace. I very much like the fireplace in the main bar which has the same size builders opening above the arch.

 

[Zebra]

Oh yes, I see now that I look from home on the laptop. Looking on my phone it looked like a timber bressumer. I wonder if you could even turn the worst of the spalled bricks around?