Remodeling the fireplace

We have been doing some remodeling. Ideally, we'll end up with a completely new and different house. Realistically, we'll end up with a prettier house, hopefully one that is a little more usable and a lot more pleasant.

One of our projects is a fireplace remodel. We have icky 70's lava rock facades on two fireplaces. We're going to re-do them both in stucco. We started on one. We tore off the lava rock, which was just a veneer mortared over the fireplace brick and some of the Sheetrock. Now we have a flat surface to stucco, and we built a wood frame to serve as a form for the stucco. We screwed up lath, a metal mesh for the stucco to stick to - it becomes a part of the stucco, and helps attach the stucco to the fireplace. Next step, add some bonding agent and put up the scratch coat.

For the other fireplace, we won't bother removing the lava rock around the fireplace. We'll just stucco over it. Above the fireplace, where the lava rock extends to the ceiling, we'll remove the rock, because the room just isn't big enough to carry the enormity of that floor-to-ceiling stone, and a regular wall above the fireplace makes it easier to hang a picture, big TV, or whatever.

Our fireplaces are those inefficient old things hanging off the side of the house. For maximum efficiency, a fireplace should exist inside the house, with the chimney running through the living space so it can dissipate heat inside the heating envelope. We can make the fireplaces more efficient by adding a fireplace insert, but my dream would be to replace them with a wood stove or a real fireplace on an inside wall. My uber-dream would be a katchelofen located right in the middle of the house.* I can dream. :-)

One odd thing we discovered as we prepared for stucco - a clean fireplace is a beautiful thing. We don't want cleaning-splatter all over the new stucco, so we scrubbed the fireplace as an intermediate step. The fireplace extends off the side of the house (think chimney climbing up the side of a house - the firebox is in that chimney, outside the room, which is why it's inefficient). With the firebox cleaned, the brick lightened up nicely, and we can see the depth of the fireplace more easily. It visually expands the room two more feet - that is, it makes the room feel a little bigger because the furthest wall you can see is now the back wall of the fireplace, which is actually outside of the house. When it was all dark and sooty, it looked more like a flat plane, even with the interior wall.

* Does dreaming of efficient home improvements make me a major geek? If so, I'll go one geekier: Solatubes. If you go to a model home, you'll find super-bright light bulbs and lots of clean windows with the curtains open. House porn pictures often feature walls of windows, photographed during the day. Light, bright rooms look great and feel great. A solatube is a tubular skylight, 10 or 14 inches in diameter, with a super-reflective tube that maximizes natural light gain during the day. They're designed to minimize heat gain while maximizing free sunlight inside. $400 installed, $250 DIY, and it brings sunlight to a dark room, closet, or hallway. With an optional lightkit, it can replace an existing electric light and provide lighting after the sun goes down. With an optional dimmer (a baffle that rotates to block light), you can put a solatube into a TV room and close the "curtains" (the baffle) for movie watching during daylight hours. The bells and whistles double the price, but I really, really want a solatube in the kitchen so it looks and feels terrific. Another one without the bells and whistles would make the master closet brighter (and, gosh, I'm always wearing one navy sock and one black sock because I can't tell the difference in poor light), and one in the hall will make the whole house feel brighter. Though $400 each is a chunk of cash, it's cheaper than adding a window - and TONS cheaper than adding a window in my stucco-sided house.