Buck Stove 91 and Cultured Stone Hearth on TX High Plains

I have been lurking on this website and forums for over a year now. When we started building our new home on the ranch we knew we wanted a wood stove as our primary heat source. I spent hours researching stoves and hearth building and this site and its memebers were extremely helpful. You helped me narrow down the things I was looking for in a stove before I ended up buying a Buck stove locally here in west texas. We still have some finish work to do on the interior of the house, but we moved in just after Christmas and installed the stove a week ago. Since then the heat pump has yet to come on and we've had some fairly chilly days on the High Plains and are expecting some snow this afternoon.

We put the return air vent for the HVAC near the top of the wall in the living room which has a vaulted ceiling. All I have to do is kick on the fan at low in the HVAC unit and circulate the warm air to the entire house, sometimes I don't even have to do that! Our home is a 3 bed 2-1/2 bath and just shy of 2,000 sq ft. We splurged on insulation - on a true 6' cavity due to the steel c-perlin exterior wall construction we sprayed in 1' of polyurythane foam and then R-19 bats on top of that so we have about R-26 walls and R-33 ceilings. We decided on the Buck Stove Model 91 for capacity, effeciency and a number of features we were looking for. I have attached some pictures of the cultured stone hearth and the stove in place on it. Hopefully it will help spark ideas for others as many of the existing pics did for us.

Again thanks to all those on this website and forum!

A shot after My wife did a little decorating.

Pic of just the hearth

Beautiful job on the hearth - congratulations

Looks very nice and sounds like you did a great jobe to retaine all of that heat. Some of these recent threads are making me think I should abandon my internal chimney and make my Olyimpic a stand alone instead of an insert.