September fire

Hi Folks.

Well, I have been too busy playing with mud to reload many of the pictures of past projects.  But my friends Joe and Michelle sent me a pic of this heater nearing completion at their place.  A bit more shaping… insetting some tile mosaic… then time for finish plaster.

 

Now here it is after plaster and many coats of hemp oil.  The blue area of ceiling above is roughly where the top of the original rectangular brick and stone monolith fireplace was located.  Joe and Michelle wanted this new  masonry heater to have as low a profile as possible, so that kids could crawl around on it and find all kinds of places to sit.  At the same time, they wanted a big firebox that burns only once a day; so this made for a functional tension (the bigger the fire the more mass you need to harvest the heat…), but I think we pulled it off.  There is also a chimney flue from a basement woodstove running through the heater just to the left of the fire box.

Sometimes the building process evolves as we go.  At first there was no plan to replace the original pie-shaped wooden steps.  So, out of concern for tripping hazard, the bake oven was located opposite the firebox door rather than in the heater’s end wall.

For a while during the build we thought we’d go for a jungle mangrove vine/root feel to the chimney… then got to aiming for a nice cedar tree… then it ended up sort of ‘whatever’ with a bit of a Dr Seuss feel  🙂

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