Day 27: More Bricks

On Day 27 (17th February), the task of brining all bricks into the house (all in all 4.5 tons of material) was completed – thanks to Juha for helping! The photo above shows all the bricks needed for the chimney. Every layer requires four bricks, and there are some 55 layers for a chimney of maybe 5.5 metre height.

In the photo above, in the lower-left corner, one of the chimney layers is laid out to demonstrate how it will work. This chimney is designed to keep as much heat as possible in the brickwork in order to radiate it into our living room. Thus the exhaust air from the fireplace will leave Our House as cold as possible.

The fireplace itself is delivered as a kit, and it is once assembled dry (without cement obviously) at the factory. Then all individual layers of bricks are numbered before they are packed onto palettes. This last palette was the trickiest and slowest to unload, because we had to make sure that all bricks with the same layer numbers are somehow placed together – and there are an awful lot of layers, and even half layers (11.5 and 24.5).

Over the next couple of weeks, this will be put together layer-by-layer following the detailed instructions (above, first 10 layers). I will be at the house helping to hand bricks to our mason, which should be a fun project.

Also the mason dropped by today, and placed another layer of large bricks under the fireplace, thereby bringing the foundations exactly up to floor level. Once this layer is dry, we can start to build the fireplace itself.