Day 627: Opening things up a bit

So underneath the lousy wallpaper was a lousy plastering job .. it wasn't even flush. But what was it covering? Would I find some lovely original tiled Victorian fireplace insert underneath possibly? On the bright side, the fireplace was in use with an old, now removed gas burner. This means that we could replace it with a working fireplace .. only a nice one this time.

With the metal grate removed, I did find a Victorian insert. I could use many words to describe it, but lovely wouln't be one of them. The original large fireplace had been fairly clumsily bricked up and a cracked insert was placed there surrounded by building waste. Not ideal.

For those interested, more on the history of fireplaces can be found here 

As I removed the insert, more rubble began falling through. As if it was mocking me, lovely Victorian tile fragments came falling down. Did somebody really smash away those nice tiles to put in this ugly insert? We will never know.

Anyway, there was a whole lot of material coming out of this thing. Good thing we have a skip on the way soon.

 

And back to the original opening. You can see the small arch created by height-wise bricks that supported the opening. This was held in place by a metal bar running underneath the arch. We were tempted to work with the exposed brick, but have decided to just plaster over the whole thing and install a nice mantel/fireplace surround. 

The question we are pondering now is whether to put in a non-functional Victorian insert or go with a log burning stove. Either would be a huge improvement over what was there before.

Day 648: A new appointment

You wouldn’t think it but a lot of thought goes into the little bits of mortar between the bricks. What colour to use (grey, grey with yellow, dark grey) and even what style of pointing  (weather torn, recessed, flush, a little bit proud, a lot proud) .. Luckily sloppy smearing wasn’t one of the options we had to consider.

As this was the first pointing decision Care and I had to make we, as expected, had no clue. It all comes down to taste. Michael was nice enough to run some test lines in different shades and styles. One was too dark, one was too light.

The weather torn (my choice) eventually won the style competition. We went with a more yellow-grey look to complement the red in the bricks. So once decided (finally), on went the pointing. 

As could be expected given the previous few days, the guys swarmed on it like an army of bees and accomplished the bulk of it in a single day. Which, by the way, was a Saturday. They even managed to re-rendered the window sills. All while we enjoyed a picnic in the rain (gotta love London). Yes, Scott the Builder was allowed to take a day off.

Lots of work to get here but as you can see from the final product, it was worth all the effort.