Heat and More Heat!

(NO, WE ARE STILL NOT IN!)

Now that I've got that out of my system....have my blogs become more frantic as we go?

Anyway, WE HAVE HEAT, both the radiant floor heat is now on and a new fireplace is in! First floor heat. I'm sure some of you remember that we did our own tubing. This happened quite a while ago and I blogged about it some time in the summer of 2012. To turn on that heat, quite a bit of boiler stuff had to happen. 

 First off, meet John, John is our magic man. He makes all these boiler pieces work. Both Curt and he have been working on the system now for about a month or so. I wish I could truly explain it all, it's just crazy, but the amount of parts he had to put together boggle the mind. I'm serious!

This is kind of a good overview shoot of the boiler room.

This funny little copper square box like thing is a heat exchanger. The hot water from the water heater goes through it and then comes back in after heating the floor. It's kinda crazy how the water is really pretty cool when it comes back through, but hot after it hits this little box. There are all sorts of gages and tubes and pipes and they all do something and I'm just not that interested in it all except that IT WORKS AND MY FLOOR IS HEAVENLY WARM!

This part below tells you how much water is needed in each of the tubes and each area. It's pretty cool. But again, beyond my care to comprehend such things.

I am MUCH, MUCH more interested in the fireplace. It literally went up in a week. It was  really exciting to watch and I was disappointed I was at work the whole time.

First things first, we were going to do a really modern type of fireplace out of concrete block, however, my scavenger of a husband found these bricks for free, yes that's right, free! As I've said before this is the house that craigs list has built.

A little more traditional than what we were going for in the beginning, but free is free and the fire place is really cool!

We had a mason friend of ours build it for us and he did an amazing job. 

Here is a stack-o-bricks that they used. And you can see, it was literally the coldest time of the year. I think it was a whole 20 degrees out.

 And the brick saw!

Then they start with a base. I will apologize for some poor quality pictures. I could only get up there in the dark for most of the week, so the lighting was really bad.

You can see it's a really good size!

After they get the base built they fill the fire box part with concrete.

The fireplace turns around the corner and has a huge section for firewood storage.

This angle is taken from the hallway to the bedroom. So the fireplace adds a bit of privacy to the back of the house where the bedrooms are. It gets taller. :)

These blocks get removed from under the heart, they are holding it up while it dries.

The kind of fireplace we build is called a Rumford, these are some of the pieces that are used for the flue and fire box.

These are the only picture I have of Jody and his worker actually building it. Curt had to get them for me. I was at work.

It's starting to take shape now.

As you can see this goes all the way to the ceiling. Which adds the privacy to the back.

And here is is almost all finished. We have not got the mantel on and the chimney covered all up yet. But we can now build a fire in the house. As you can see the fire box is shallow, we have to build a taller fire and this allows for more heat to go into the house. The whole top of it that looks kinda messy gets covered up. And we have some glass blocks with lights coming to fill in the holes you see on the left hand side. 

Next up should be cabinets. One of the showers is done, but I'll blog about that when then are both done.