Burn baby, burn

When we moved to our house nearly 3 1/2 years ago, it needed lots of work. We invested nearly $50,000 in remodeling the kitchen and bathrooms.

After we moved in.

I will never, ever, ever, do that again!

But despite having the Contractor from Hell we ended up with a much-improved (as in livable!) house.

Unfortunately, we couldn't afford to remodel the fireplace then, too, so we spent a darn cold first winter in our old 1904 house. If I remember correctly, the girls and I spent most of every day upstairs, which the radiators seemed to keep almost too warm at times.

But downstairs?

Yikes.

Just the cold waves moving in from the walls and huge windows were enough to send us scurrying for covers.

We've toughened up since then, however, and are able to keep our thermostat set at 65 degrees during the day and 55 at night. I'm not sure, however, that we could have borne this without the repair to our fireplace late last fall.

This is what it looked like the first year and a half we lived here. Everything original, complete with cold air whooshing down the chimney. The woman who owned the house before us kept the whole fireplace covered with black plastic to keep out the chill.

It even had a nice coating of antique ash.

Last fall we finally decided to install a high-efficiency wood burning unit. It doesn't quite have the look I wanted, but we had to find something that would fit in our unusually small opening. That left only one choice, but I've come to like it. I also had to come up with a tile solution, as we didn't want to (nor could we afford) to replace the period tile. I found this set of three tiles on-line and am quite pleased with how the whole thing turned out.

Here is the fireplace as it looks today:

It's made a huge difference in our comfort downstairs, making this room the family gathering place.

It has an electric fan and puts out a lot of heat.

We also discovered that by closing one set of pocket doors and a hallway door we can effectively shut off the front half of the house, thereby trapping all that luscious heat in the living room.

And with temperatures here at -3 degrees and lows around -17, never mind the wind chills, this room has become our haven!