Saturday, November 12, 2011

New Life for Our Old Chimney

When we purchased the house last year, there was this chimney that extended all the way up through the house from the basement and quite a bit taller than the house. It was the chimney that was used for the cooking stove when the house was built in 1912. Well, we're not so strict about being "period" that we were willing to back up to a wood stove, so this chimney was superfluous. So we removed it, in order to claim the space it was occupying for the kitchen remodel.


Most of the brick went into the dumpster, unfortunately, because when the workers removed the old chimney, they simply dropped the bricks from the top down to the bottom. But we saved whatever we thought was in good enough shape to reuse. And that chimney was converted into this pile.

After many hours of cleaning and installing those bricks, that old chimney is starting a new life as our front path. We are getting really close to being done. We still have many of the odd-shaped edge pieces to cut, but we were tired, hungry and it was raining, so we decided to finish another day (hopefully tomorrow, if the weather cooperates).

5 comments:

  1. What a great idea to reuse the bricks. It looks great!

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  2. I love the brick path! We reused our bricks to create a path out back to the driveway.

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  3. Nice! I have the original chimney in my house too. It was used for the cooking stove and is now used for the exhaust for the water heater and furnace.

    I one day want to get some old street bricks and do my whole driveway in them.

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  4. What an absolutely great re-use! We have a superfluous chimney that's been drywalled over inside and it's starting to be somewhat dangerous outside. I'm wondering if we could try something like this? (Must forward your post to the husband.)

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