Newbie building a new house and needs fireplace guidance. Help?

If you don't have a lot of experience, it could be harder to make all the decisions up front and it might be better to put off some decisions until you've had more experience. Still you should think about the whole process and start making the decisions you can.

1. If you're having wood delivered (usually dumped) probably will come up the driveway and will be dumped either on the driveway or on an area adjacent to it. Then someone is going to stack it. You're probly not going to be able to put it all in the garage. Will it go on a covered porch, in a shed to be built, or elsewhere. If you follow the recommendations here, you should be thinking in terms of keeping more than a years supply on hand to dry out. The firewood for next year further away, the current years supply closer.

2. How much wood do you want to keep in the house -- 1 days supply or a weeks supply or more. Many (more finicky) people don't want to keep much if any in the house -- bugs, mess, etc. How often are you going to want to be bringing it in. Some don't mind bringing it in every day. Personally I like to keep at least a weeks worth at hand-- rarely if ever see any bugs.

Some people have an open wood box near the fireplace -- you might have something where there would be a door at the back of the wood box with access from the garage that you would load up from the garage and then close the door, and then it would be open to the room. Or it could be like the box you pictured where the back or side of that box would have an access door from the garage and you would fill it from the garage and remove it by opening the door on top. Point is if you don't have to be carrying wood from the outside into the house through other rooms to load the box, your wife is likely to be more amenable to the whole operation. But if your burning 24/7 the box you have pictured looks small and may just hold a one days supply-- not a problem if you don't mind loading it daily.

Since the garage is unheated and the house is tight, you probly want to think in terms of a tightly sealed weatherstripped and insulated door of the same properties as any other exterior door in your house (even if it's smaller) Of course if you don't have to make it a custom size but can find something stock size, cost will be lower, so you might think in terms of that. Though I would think smaller/less conspicuous would be better. Or it might just be a full size 30-36x68 door from the FR into the storage area at the back of the garage where you keep your current supply of wood (therefore not even needing a decorative wood box in the FR since it's in the garage but still close to the fireplace, in that case you'd need to decide where on that wall to put the door. I'd think you should be able to keep at least a weeks supply of wood in the garage.

Still. without experience, you don't really know how much you're going to be burning. 24/7 might be too much for you. So if you're not sure or don't want to hem yourself in, you might want to put off some decisions until you've had experience with it. This is only my second heating season with wood. In the beginning I was bringing wood in every day. That was too frequent and restricting a routine for me and now I keep about a 10 day supply bringing in wood and dumping ashes as part of the routine.

And just to repeat something Scotty Overkill mentioned about a stove in an alcove made to look like it's in a fireplace -- you might want to take a look at the thread "pictures of stoves in alcoves". There are two there where the alcove is made to look like a mock fireplace -- and suggest some very interesting ideas.

https://www.hearth.com/talk/threads/pictures-of-wood-stoves-in-alcoves.105795/#post-1381544

http://tinyurl.com/ylye7l5 Dakotas Dad

and flusher 17's 3rd post in the thread
there are also some stove's in real fireplaces like Billybonfire's and Jofuls.

I also am a fireplace person, have to admit it, I just prefer the look of a fireplace -- but I like the look of a cast iron or soapstone stove inside a fireplace -- if the fireplace is large enough. I mention this because there should be a savings doing it that way-- stove inside of an alcove made to look like a fireplace. But whatever you do, you should look into the idea of insulating the outside walls of your fireplaces-- inside fireplaces are the most efficient, but uninsulated fireplaces on outside walls can really lose a lot of heat.