Before and After: The Fireplace

The fireplace is done! After a remarkable transformation, it's now making a significant contribution to cozy winter nights at the new house. Here are the "before" and "after" versions. If you're curious, read on to follow it through the stages of metamorphosis.
A fireplace was high on my wishlist when I started househunting. I really missed the crackle and glow of a wood fire in my various apartments, and always looked forward to winter holiday visits at my parents' house particularly for the chance to warm my bones at the hearth. So the fireplace was one of the features that sold me on this house; I knew it would need a bit of work, but the infrastructure was here and that was what counted.

I never really considered switching to gas - I just can't get past the fake logs and the blue flames, despite the flip-of-a-switch convenience. Not despite, actually - bringing in the wood, crumpling newspaper, lighting the match, blowing on the tender new flames until the kindling catches . . . these are all part of the satisfaction. Not to mention that it seems wise to choose fossil fuel alternatives whenever possible. But I also wanted a clean-burning fire that wasn't going to suck out more heat than it contributed to the house, so a wood-burning insert was the way to go. Giving up the crackle and pop of open flames seems a worthwhile price to pay for energy efficiency.

After some shopping around, I decided on Pacific Energy's smallest model, the Vista, a compact insert rated to heat the whole 1500 square feet of my house. The folks at Fireside Hearth and Leisure were great to work with, and Ken started the full fireplace makeover at the bottom, with the hearth.

The existing rough fieldstone was quickly dispatched with Ken's electric chisel. (For the record, I tried to do it myself with a hammer and crowbar, to no avail.) Then we laid out the six fan-shaped sheets of slate tile I'd chosen up the road at Tilemart, cutting here and there to get the pattern to come out right. Over several days Ken set them in mortar and grouted them, and I really like the result.
Next Ken pulled out the old insert, climbed a ladder to the top of the chimney, dropped a liner down and with it a sooty pile of black creosote (failing to break into a chorus of Chim Chim Cheree although he definitely looked the part at that point), and brought in the new insert. He mortared over the old heatilator grates, now obsolete. Then I helped choose stones to outline the insert, and he slapped those up with more mortar. Voila! Fully functional at this point, although not yet beautiful.
Time to move on upward. I took over from here; my plan was to cover the painted bricks with a layer of clay plaster, a "green" product I was curious to try. It was a process of many steps. Consultations with Jim from local business Eco-Building Products and by phone with American Clay, as well as much poring over the extensive online application instructions, led me to the following course of action.
1) Fill in the mortar joints with a setting joint compound (Sheetrock EZ-Sand) to create a flat surface.
2) Seal the joint compound with a regular paint primer.
3) Apply American Clay's sanded primer, which gives the surface a rough texture so the clay can adhere.
4) Apply the plaster (two coats plus a final compression step).

Here's what it looked like after the first three steps:
And here's the procedure for applying the plaster. It comes dry in a 50 pound bag. You mix it with water until, depending on whose instructions you're following, the consistency resembles soft-serve ice cream, pudding, or cake batter. (It reminded me of cocoa frosting, and I did have urges to dip in a finger and taste it.) The stuff was really very nice to work with - no odor and very easy to clean up, not at all like paint. Also very forgiving, unlike the joint compound that kept hardening in my bucket before I could finish.

You can add pigments to get a variety of colors, but I just went with the off-white shade of the plaster itself. My very fancy equipment included an old ice-cream bucket and a square of cardboard for a palette, and I troweled the stuff on with a complete lack of plastering experience to guide me. Amazingly, it seems to have worked like a charm. I put on two coats of plaster two days apart, then the following day sprayed it down with water and went over it with a sponge to compress and smooth it.

I also scraped all the white paint off the mantel to get it back to natural wood. It took a whole afternoon but was such a satisfying exercise that I couldn't stop once I started.

So here it is! And now I believe I've earned a cozy evening beside the fire with a book.