Fireplace

A couple of months ago we had a mud party to make adobe bricks for a fireplace. Well, the fireplace is finally going up. Just thought you'd like a picture of what we have so far:


Kiko is building it for us, and he's got lots of good ideas. You can see the bench on the right side, along with some light weight bricks resting on top of the bench. The light weight bricks (just sawdust and clay) are for the tall chimney.

Initially, the actual fire pit looked too small. But after a couple of little test fires, we found it throws off a lot of heat. Plus, it's of the Rumford design, which is good at pulling the smoke up the chimney, and is very efficient (for a fireplace).

It's tough to tell from the photo, but the chimney in this photo stops about 6 feet off the ground (right at the top of the photo). While it looks cute, the smoke curls back down into the sitting area when the wind blows north. So we're going higher, about 5 feet higher. I floated the idea to Kiko to make a spiral design up the chimney, which I think intrigued him (he talked about one guy he knew that made columns spiral by slightly offsetting the square bricks).

We're very excited to see how it turns out. And just in time for cool weather!