Building the fireplace

The fireplace insert is at the local freight depot and will be here early tomorrow. I can't recommend Dixonline highly enough. They're near Wollongong and have arranged to freight our heater to us. It's a genuine family owned company run by Sean and his father. Sean is a builder so can answer almost any question we can throw his way.

Today Charlie the builder dropped in to measure up the fireplace in preparation for bricking the surround. The line drawn on the floor is where the brickwork will be finishing. 

He had a concern that we may have to brick onto the flooring, which with movement would cause damage down the track. Apparently the existing hearth is a foundation structure and separate to the floor. I'm so glad that Charlie thought of this as it's not something that even crossed my mind, but we already have a problem with the floor being uneven.

In the south east corner of the lounge the floor has dropped about 10cm. Apologies for the shocking pic but just to give you an idea of the extent of our problem. This needs to be repaired to stop draughts but no one wants to crawl under the house to do it.

To get around the problem of the new fireplace being damaged, Charlie will cut cement sheeting to sit on top of the existing fireplace. This will create a stable bed for the brickwork and prevent damage once the floors are lifted.

So the fireplace is ready to go. Thank god I've asked Charlie to do this as I would never have thought about movement in the floorboards and my DIY would have cracked and fallen down.

I ordered half a pallet of bricks from the supplier and ordered the wrong cement mix. I started off by asking for pre mix which is a concreting mix. So the phone call started off all wrong. What I wanted was sand and cement. When it arrived I realised that we already had this stuff and it wasn't what Charlie wanted. He had asked me to buy a quarter scoop of sand and two bags of cement. Next time I will listen.

Walter keeping a keen eye on the bricks.