Here’s how it looks so far

I didn’t get a real “before” picture of our fireplace, because I didn’t know, when they began to dismantle it, that it wouldn’t ever get put back together again.  But, for what it’s worth, here’s what it looked like yesterday morning:

It used to have a screen in front of it, too, and wasn’t internally dismantled.

You can see the ash grate in the middle there.  That was put in so that the ash from the fire would fall down into a pit below (in the basement) and be easier to clean up.  That will go away with the new design.  Aaron doesn’t even want to know how they rigged it.

Here’s the side pocket mentioned before.  That SHOULD have been sealed from the middle, because it wasn’t fire proof.  There’s a matching one on the other side.  However, it wasn’t sealed from the firebox, and it was full of wood…that had gotten charred and creosoted and (blessedly) hadn’t caught fire yet.

Yeah.  This is how it looked before Aaron cleaned up today.  Not too pretty.  The top segment that’s still there is the makeshift attempt at a smoke chamber.

Their attempts to funnel the smoke up the chimney, though, don’t even look that polished to me.  Aaron wants to take it out, since he’s not really sure how they anchored it to the wall, and isn’t, so far, inspired to trust that they did that well enough that it might not decide to come crashing down at some future date.  But he’ll need someone to help him, as it’s concrete and large.

Here’s the ash grate.  That used to be about the width of the firebox.  You can see the smoke staining on the parts of the fireplace that were supposed to be outside the firebox, sealed off from it.  And…what are those little round things on both sides?  They would have been inside the bricked areas.

They appeared to be tubes rigged to get air into the side chambers from the ash grate, although why that would have been in place is anyone’s guess…A good way to pump oxygen into a new fire next to the wall, in a compartment full of wood.

And, yes!, there’s one on each side!

That oxygen, should there have been a fire, would have assisted in setting fire to this lathe – from the wall – that was STICKING OUT in the side chambers.

I’m just thankful for our guardian angels watching out for us!