show me your fireplaces!

[azasadny]

Note the "Porsche content" (picture above fireplace)



Model Porsche on shelf and Porsche books...



Our home was built in 1936 and this fireplace and shelves are "original" to the house and are very well constructed.

[svandamme]

damn i wish i had a picture of our old house , from when i was 8-10 years old..

it was a tatched roof house, very rustic, mice and birds living in the roof... great fun in summer, cold as hell in winter time, so the fireplace, had to be big... and boy , it was big... we would regulary take 2 of those EU standardized pallets.... and put them in the fireplace, whole...
then light those suckers...there was a wooden sill on top of the fire place, obviously not right above the flames... and it was a beam about 16inches square... not only did the cat use it to walk around.. I used it to get from one end of the walkway to the other... i'm talking massive....we had a X-max BBQ on that thing for the whole familly...

[Moses]

What a timely thread. My fireplaces need help. It's not that I don't like brick, but the work wasn't done really well. If you look closely, there are areas where the mortar doesn't match and there are large areas where the mortar was left on the face of the bricks, leaving a haze. I've tried acid washing the bricks, but it doesn't help. Maybe it's time to cover the whole mess with stone. What do you think? the first two pics are the living room, the next two are in the master bedroom.

[javadog]

For what it's worth, here's mine. It was originally a poorly done, dark brown sandstone. It all got ripped out and I replaced it with a cast "stone" version. It looks pretty close to carved stone at a fraction of the cost. Still not cheap, though...

JR

[craigster59]

Here's ours in our 1927 "English Cottage" style bungalow...

[fastpat]

Originally posted by Moses
What a timely thread. My fireplaces need help. It's not that I don't like brick, but the work wasn't done really well. If you look closely, there are areas where the mortar doesn't match and there are large areas where the mortar was left on the face of the bricks, leaving a haze. I've tried acid washing the bricks, but it doesn't help. Maybe it's time to cover the whole mess with stone. What do you think? the first two pics are the living room, the next two are in the master bedroom.

I think I'd hire an interior decorator, or architect, to come up with a clever way to make your brick work more integrated into your home, i.e. less starkly brick. I think you can alter the color of mortar after the fact, but I'd check on that.

[rammstein]

This probably highlights my lack of style, but I dig Moses's existing setup.

[JavaBrewer]

Originally posted by snowman
dmoolenaar's work is much better than 99% of anything you can usually get...

WOW...thanks for the great compliments, I'm gonna show this thread to my wife as a reminder

Before starting the application I made a template of the fireplace on the floor and was test fitting/picking stones for many hours. If you look close you'll see that the bottom portion layout changed between the "during" and "completed" pictures. I prefer the first layout but I played around with mortor color and ended up way too dark ruining the first layout...DOH! I had to demo that portion and redo which resulted in the final shot. I stuck with natural mortor coloring and think it turned out fine.

[JavaBrewer]

Oh and I agree with Pat about the brick. I'd start playing around with paint and other interior mods to compliment. The white walls are pretty stark against that much brick.

[snowman]

dmoolenaar (David). You have done what any good stone mason does and it takes some real thought to get it right. One difference with the pros is that they can do it on the fly, making decisions as they go. Even then I have seen my father set a few stones on the floor and rearrange them until he thought it looked right. I did my master bath/ shower the way you did it. I took at least 4 or 5 days rearranging stones for the shower floor, so they "fit" togather naturally. All the people that actually did the work wanted photos after it was done.

[notfarnow]

Originally posted by rammstein
This probably highlights my lack of style, but I dig Moses's existing setup.

+1.

I like the way the brick carries into the archway and the hallway.

[snowman]

Moses,

Unfortunately you have what could have a very good work turn been out very badly. The simple, brick presentation requires a great deal of precision and attention to detail, like the mortar and uniformity of the brick spacing. A couple of Mexican hacks were no doubt responsible for the outcome. There are some really good Mexican masons, but they are very far and few between. A job like this should only be let to Irish, English or maybe even French people who have a long tradition of using brick in a fine setting as opposed to a crude setting that the Mexicans are familiar with. Look at the cultural background of the people proposing to do the job. If you like what you see in Mexico, hire a Mexican, if you like what you see in Ireland, hire an Irishman, and so forth. Stereotyping, heck yes, but that’s what you are looking for a stereotype in the work itself. It IS a cultural thing and its passed on by the apprentice system. Mexicans are not part of this system. My point is not to be anti Mexican, but there is just so darn many of them around, and their work is generally very inferior.

What can you do to fix it? Cover it up with something else, but look long and hard at what they have done before you hire them. Make sure they are the ones that actually designed the works they produced, talk to the people they worked for, ask for referances. Word of mouth is he best way to go, backed up by multiple referances. Just like picking the best doctor. If you mention a guys name and everyone says you can't go wrong, you are on the right track.

I don't like unions, but go to the mason/bricklayers union and ask for the best guy to do your job. The best are usually a member of the union just because they have to be. And if they were trained properly, they MUST have served an apprenticeship, there is no other way.

I once found the definition of a moron. It was, "a person who lays bricks". Of course I gave it to my father, nuff said. On the other side, the richest people in the world paid this moron to fly around the country to build fireplaces for them. He was paid much more than the best Porsche mechanic in the world to do so. There must be some contemperary doing the same thing, just start asking around.