23 Fire places

Fire places 2 - 8 / 24 May 2016

The 3 fire places and 2 fire place surrounds were built out of small fire bricks.

(the 3rd surround was a marble surround and was removed prior to taking the chinmey down) 
All 3 fire places have a feature, purpose hewed stone above the fire place as some sort of smoke barrier to the room.
Rebuilding the fire places brick by brick was going to be huge task and I deemed making the hewed stone fit again was going to be very tricky.
I wanted to see if I could come up with a plan to take the fire places in one piece and had left them untouched till the end.

For both smaller (Bedroom) fireplaces I came up with the idea to cast them into reinforced concrete and lift them out by a crane.
The surround of the large Living room fireplace was carefully boxed in and tilted onto a pallet in order to be able to crane it out.
Both procedures worked out fine.

Some fire bricks at the centres of a fireplace were cracked due to overheat (burning coal instead of wood) and bits had broken off.
The original grades and copper ash trays were retrieved and are in storage.