Sometimes being bold and taking risks in home projects pays off — you improve the look of your home, save some money, and even have some fun! But what's the other side of the coin? Disaster, of course! Sometimes the best laid plans for a seemingly simple project around the house can implode right before your eyes...
One of (yes, I said one of; there have been others!) my worst project failures was the idea to take off the cast iron door that sealed up our fireplace. I knew the chimney was sealed off from the top; when the previous owners installed a new roof, they cut the top off of the chimney and roofed right over it. I knew it wouldn't be a functional fireplace, but I wanted to at least have a decorative fireplace, with the old bricks and stone from the original facade (our house was built in 1910.) That, and the cast iron monstrosity that plugged up the fireplace was pretty ugly!
Here's how the project looked in my head: Crack open the cast iron grate, and pry it off the brick. Use a shop vac to sweep out the fireplace and scrub down the bricks and stone with a brush. Enjoy my new fireplace; maybe stack some birch logs in the opening, or fill it with a cute display with white twinkle lights.
Here's how the project actually happened: Crack open the cast iron grate, and watch as soot and dust pour out of the opening onto my feet. Decide to forge ahead. Pass the point of no return, pull the grate completely off. Find that the fireplace is blocked full of brick and piles of soot and ash.
Cover all the furniture in the room. This is going to be ugly.
Carefully remove all the brick and soot and ash, brick by brick and dustpan-full by dustpan-full. Find that the chimney is also full of bricks, all the way up the chimney, like a giant, dusty game of pick-up-sticks.
Jam a broom up the chimney to try to knock loose the bricks. Dodge out of the way of a brick avalanche. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat, until no more bricks are falling on my head. Safety disclaimer: I do not endorse or recommend this method!
Then get to the part about simply vacuuming out the space and scrubbing the bricks, and enjoying my fireplace — about 10 hours, lots of soot, sweat, and bruises later. Here's a picture of the finished fireplace in our dining room — please excuse the pumpkins; it was October!
So that's my story — what's yours? Have you ever had a project not go quite to plan? Did you find a resolution?
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SO worth it ! Congrats.
I love your story! I would say that very few home improvement projects go according to plan. My first disaster [1995] was when i decided to steal some space from an adjacent bedroom for the tiny bathroom in our turn of the century house. opened up the walls to find a mix of knob and tube wiring, hemp wrapped wiring and lamp wiring all spliced together feeding the bathroom. oh yeah, and a lot of soot. grandiose plans led to a gut job that ended up taking 3 years to build back out. I got the bug and ended up flipping & eventually holding old houses. There are still disasters from time to time, but at least now I expect them. my advice is to plan like hell, count on the "OFF" [Oh, F' Factor], have a back up number for a professional ready and get your tetanus shots. have fun & get dirty
Ha, @Yeah, I love the OFF! So true.
I think it was worth it as well. Not only because it looks good but because I don't know if it was wise of the former owners to let it collapse and leave it. Someone with more expertise or knowledge can weigh in and confirm or deny my suspicions. I think it was good to get that junk out of there. I think you are now prepped to run a liner and reopen the roof if you someday want the fireplace to function.
My concern is the structural integrity of the existing chimney. You may want to have an architect or structural engineer review this.
For me it was a simple plan to replace the cracked plate glass bathroom mirror and ancient fluorescent tube light fixture. I got a new mirror and light from IKEA for a quick, $100 fix. Figured I'd be done in 2 hours, tops.
First I had to remove the mirror, which due it's tight fit and large size, turns out it had to be broken to be removed. I covered it with tape and an old sheet, then started bashing away. One challenge was that holes had been cut out of the wall mirror to allow the light switch and GCF outlet to be mounted over the mirror. Um, who knew that the stuff painted on the back of mirrors was actually metal that would conduct electricity? (Hint: not me.) I found out pretty quick when I fried the outlet and scared the sh*t out of myself. Luckily the circuit breaker did it's job. And yes, I should have turned off the circuit. Lesson learned: $150 to the electrician.
Wall behind the mirror that I hoped was just a painted wall? Oh hellz no. I discovered a giant hole, several smaller holes, wallpaper remnants, and copper pipes running exactly behind the spot I needed to screw in the new mirror. Which now was not going to work. Also not going to work? The IKEA light fixture. Turns out, for reasons too challenging to repair, that I needed a fixture with a larger mounting plate.
New mirror and light fixture that had the required mounting plate -- $600 and 5 days to shop and have shipped. Meanwhile, bathroom is without a light or a mirror. Ugh! Well, at least I had time to patch and sand the walls.
So, about 3 weeks and $750 later my bathroom was much nicer.
Def worth the sweat equity (and potential concussion). You've increased the resale value of your house.
I was obsessed with rollers shades and tried to make one out of my favorite wallpaper. Fail. Next I brought cheap vinyl shades and glued the wall papers on the shades. Double fail. I cut the vinyl shades off the rollers and glued canvas onto them. Kind of worked even though they were abit crooked, that is until I noticed there was a streetlight right outside my bedroom window. Why didn’t I notice that before? I end up buying curtains from Pottery Barn and blackout liners and double curtain rods from Target. The roller shades are still there, just not used anymore. I should have skipped the roller shades and gone straight for the curtains, might have saved me $75 in vinyl shades, new fabric, rollers, gorilla glue, fabric glue, gas....
Our previous owner cemented over the exposed chimney brick that protrudes from our roof. Then he painted it BRIGHT purple. Because… you know, all chimneys should be purple. Plus, it matched really well with the crazy neon orange he painted the underside of the porch roof.
In the only move we could think of to top his insanity… we took out the chimney. If you have never removed one floor level of solid brick? You cannot imagine FOUR floors of solid brick. It was horrifying. And filthy dirty. And I can still summon the smell of creasote. But the space it opened up has changed the floor plan of our house.
It was not a wood-burning fireplace, it was the flue to the original coal furnace. And I wouldn’t have thought you could remove a chimney… but it turns out that certain kinds of chimneys are not central to a house’s structure. Who knew?
that doesn't sound so bad. and it only took 10 hours. not bad. i live in an old house from the 20's and every time i try to do some type of improvement, open up the walls, etc. it leads to countless other projects, or the discovery of other problems that need fixing. when i was younger, i thought a $1,000 was a lot of money. after owning a home, anything a $1,000 and under is cheap. i once took out an old wall a/c unit, discovered rot, didn't like the adjacent windows anyway, and it led to me blowing out the whole exterior wall and re-building it. sometimes it's the only way, and the right way.
No plan survives contact with the enemy. And that's times ten if the enemy is your house.
The people to "cut off" the part of the chimney that extended above the roof must have dumped the bricks down into the chimney rather than hauling them off.
Parnasuss, that sounds like everything we've done (tried to do) to our 50's ranch. I have a plate mirror my husband asked about replacing and I said no for this exact reason - I KNOW there's going to be a gaping hole and who knows what other insanity back there! Good luck to you!
My husband has recently decided that someone must have plastered over the original drywall. There's just no way that between the drywall and outer layer of paint, it should be a roughly uniform quarter of an inch throughout the house. Ugh! This makes patching almost impossible, because the patches are sunken. We just end up replacing walls,
Terry in Silver Spring - I was about to say the same thing.
Rule #1 in dealing with renos in an old house is to assume that previous DIYers took every shortcut possible. That would include stuffing garbage in walls and floors -- and shoving the chimney down into itself. Hauling debris away takes effort... and why would they possibly want to expel any extra effort?
Sometimes there are happy surprises, like 4 layers of siding keeping the original siding pristine and sometimes you get a chimney cavity full of bricks. Best to prepare for the worst (laziest solution possible) and be happily surprised on the few occasions you're wrong.
What does "count on the OFF" mean?
So worth all that effort. It looks GREAT and I love pumpkins!
My parents bought our house (before I was born) from a guy named Rob who thought he was really good at home repairs. Needless to say, he was not. My parents started to refer to all his poorly done projects as "Rob jobs". My favorite story is from when they first moved in the house. They went to take up an ugly rug in the family room, only to discover that the linoleum flooring didn't continue under the rug! There was a hole with about 8 square feet of exposed ply wood underfloor. Luckily my dad was able to buy some remnants of the same linoleum and patch it.
It looks great. It looks like it was totally worth the effort.
The finished job looks great.
One of the reasons I bought my Victorian house is that it still has the original cast iron coal fires. More often than not, in London fireplaces have been removed and bricked over so all that is left is a bit of wall that sticks out, making furniture placement a bit of a nightmare.
My counterpart is the knotty pine paneling in our basement. It darkens an already dark room. We had to rip it off the two exterior walls when we had waterproofing done, and we had drywall put up in its place. But the other two walls include a stairway where the paneling has to stay. I dreamed of a lightened-up finish that would allow the grain to show, and words like "Swedish" and "aspen" bounced in my head. I had our decor store formulate polyurethane with white pigment; they tested it on scraps until it looked pale enough. I TSPed and sanded for a whole weekend. The first coat (with a brush, due to having to fill in lots of grooves) looked ... streaky. Plan B: I buffed with steel wool, which improved the sheen but not the streakiness. Plan C; I put on a second coat with a pad, and the effect was "This has been painted white except for three glaring knotholes." Plan D: Some site convinced me that the answer was a pickling finish easily obtained via "liming wax," which was hard to find. Result: barely perceptible lightening plus waxy sheen. Now we're up to Plan E. On the big wall, we're priming the whole wall, filling the grooves with drywall compound, sizing, and applying paintable wallpaper (in a really fun but subtle texture of overlapping circles, which complements the fabrics/furnishings). I've primed the stairway area and we're just going to paint it white. I can't wait for this grueling ordeal to be done, but I think it's finally going to look right. Fingers crossed.
@Lisanne, see the second reply.
I know here in Canada, it's illegal to cover something of that sorts up. My husband's co-worker is in the middle of a big legal battle because in order to fill a giant hole in the yard they used whatever they could find. IE: Paint cans, bricks, garbage, wood. Then built a shed on top of it. Yup! That would be a serious fire hazard, all that soot and ask and stuff. Yes it is closed in, but that could be why they did it. There was a chimney fire.