Clarks ACE Hardware said:
Nice looking stove.... and what a cool fireplace!
Hi J, I wish he had been able to put the warming shelves with the dragon brackets on it. I ended up ordering them from CA. and they are a beauty. He would have had to pull the stove further out though, and the hearth would not have been 16" beyond the front. It fits perfectly in that chimney and the hearth extends 16" where it sits now. Very well proportioned, not a tight fit whatsoever so it doesn't look crammed in there and you can still see the sides on it.
My father in law built that fireplace himself, along with another similar smaller one in the family room downstairs in his raised ranch. He's not even a mason, he's a union carpenter like myself. The chimney outside has some nice detail too! It has a matching archway in the brick chimney. The brick was reconditioned from a job where he tore it down himself and cleaned it all up! The marble hearth is wrapped with a piece of 1/4" brass, left over from another job. The wide oak floors in his house are gleaming and the diningroom has an inlaid detail with Brazilian Cherry, Mohogany and Purple Heart. The baseboards are 8" oak with a custom trim on top. He installed everything and even milled a lot of it himself in his wood shop that is in the basement. He works really hard to make his house look good and is meticulous about anything he does to the house. The family room in the basement is made of raised panels and so are the walls that covered the cement knee walls. The pine for the panels came from his back yard trees and went to a mill down the street, the owner became his good friend. He made all the panels himself and my wife and mother in law helped him hold them up as he nailed them to the ceiling. My wife also grouted the tile floor in the basement! When she was a young girl in middle school. The girder beam in the family room was replaced by a solid oak beam, which is beautifully finished in a gloss sheen. In the basement there is a fireplace and a hearth for a wood stove, with brick on the wall and slate on the floor. He built all of it. The house had electrick heat when they moved in and was newly built. Today he has a forced hot water furnace and baseboard heat, which he installed himself with the help of a hvac buddy. I could go on and on, some of the work I helped him myself, like his new roof and 8' oak bow window in the living room upstairs, which was really hard to lift on to the pipe staging we had set up to get it up about 8' off the ground! His old Surdiac 715 lays dormant after decades of good heating in the basement, it now will be replaced by a pellet stove. The Encore in the livingroom will be for evenings and times when he feels like having a wood fire.
He's getting older and the mill down the road, which used to supply him with an unlimited amount of free wood, has closed down. His old friend passed on a few years ago and his kids were not interested in running a mill. We did a bit of tree work together, me and the FIL, enough to get us by for a while burning wood, but as many of us know, the wood doesn't last and you have to keep working. Neither of us have acreage and buying wood seems like a shame to him. He never owned a splitter and split it all by hand when he was younger working the grapple loads into fuel year after year. The last few years he's been borrowing a splitter that he always tunes up and changes the oil in exchange for the loan. This year he bought his first cord ever! He says it was a strange experience. He also tried a few different kinds of pressed logs and brick fuel which is good, he says.
My father in law has enriched my life in more ways than he knows! He's not exactly the kind of guy you feel comfortable telling these things to. It is nice to see the Encore burning in his livingroom. The washer and dryer set he bought us in exchange for the stove are worth far more then the 1994 stove is today, even though it is in good shape. But that stove is a beauty!
