Fireplace Demo and Remodel Part 1
By the end of Day 1 of our fireplace improvement, I was feeling pretty good. The mantel and tiles came up pretty easily with minimum dust and mess. Fortunately, the tile (tucked under the wood “lip”) came out smoothly with gentle prodding.
By 9pm the debris had been cleared up, the floor swept and vacuumed, and the hole around the firebox was covered in plastic. The trash men are not going to like us this week. We’ve already filled one can full and the mantel pieces were unsalvageable.
Steve muttered more than once, “I can’t believe you trust me to tear up the living room right before Christmas.” The thought had crossed my mind. The sincere truth is that I have every bit of confidence that I’ll love the final product. (Steve did mention that if the stone is not fully installed by the time our kids arrive for Christmas morning, he’ll make sure the concrete wall looks good and the tv is mounted. LOL!)
On the morning of Day 2, I awoke before the sun with visions of critters crawling down through the flue and into my living room. Since I’m not a morning person, especially on Saturday mornings, Steve chuckled over my anxiety. We lay there pondering the day’s work until we officially declared ourselves old and hopped out of bed before 0700.
The living room hadn’t changed. The plastic covering the exposed framing was still there. Better yet, there wasn’t a squirrel, possum, or other creepy crawly anywhere in sight. Steve wasn’t worried about intruders but it seemed he was mulling over the tv wiring and how to create a permanent opening from the tv and into the adjacent cabinet allowing for future wire changes.
After breakfast, he grabbed his tools and went to work. Four hours of cutting, popping, and delicately trimming out the molding proved successful. All the drywall was gone along with the crown molding along the ceiling and to the right and left of the protruding fireplace wall.
To avoid additional patchwork later on, Steve was very precise in scoring the drywall along an existing 2×4 to prepare it to break where he needed. Amazingly, no tears occurred in the paper and by the close of operations that day, the entire front of the fireplace was gone along with small segments of the sides.
Day 3 was more of the same completing the demo of the sides. We took a trip to the store to come up with a plan for the wires. Once the fireplace is covered with stones, it will be a challenge to make any changes to the existing tv mount and wiring. After studying prepackaged wiring kits that contained mostly parts that would go unused, Steve settled on a plastic electrical box and plastic pipe that would be affixed behind the tv mount and run behind the stone into a side cabinet which would house the tivo box along with a DVD player. The plastic pipe will allow wires to be inserted and/or removed easily.
Later, he screwed the new tv mount to the existing studs to determine the correct height. He found that more studs would be needed to support the weight of the television. I laughed, “I see your priority.”
So far we’ve invested about 12 hours into this project. Steve is trying to eliminate additional fixes at the end which is why he’s moving slowly and being intentional about where he cuts the drywall.
It appears I’ll be looking at this plastic covered wall into Christmas as he’s ordered new Cat 6 wire to connect the tivo box downstairs to the main tivo upstairs. He also wants to run speaker wire from the fireplace to the existing speakers in the ceiling. He promises that he’s busy thinking it through despite the lack of forward progress.
In the meantime, I’m cleaning, wrapping, and prepping for Christmas; and trying not to look at the fireplace. It’s safe to say, this year I will be strategically staging our Christmas photos!
Or maybe not. I overheard my kids talking about past years. It’s amazing the things they remember. I guess, Christmas 2017 will be no different. I can hear them now, “Remember that year Dad tore out the fireplace and Mom kept telling us to scoot over so she didn’t get the plastic, cardboard, and wood framing in the photos?”
Stay tuned for the final update after the holidays.
Merry Christmas, everybody!!
