Stone Fireplace, Stone Staircase, Limestone Fireplaces

Installing a new stonee fireplace often involves opening up an old chimney that was blocked up years ago. In the 50s 60s and 70s many were blocked up and a luvly modern gas fire was put in a hole in the wall where the fireplace used to be. More efficient it may have been but more attractive definately not! When these things were  blocked up, builders being a resourceful bunch, would often discard items/rubbish in the hole before they bricked it up.

It’s amazing just what you find! Very often a newspaper or piece of newspaper. This will almost definately give you the date that your tasteful modern fire was installed! I always find it fascinating if there are any adverts with prices. Just brings home to you how much prices have rocketed over the last few decades, although there are often surprises, like the relative cost of electrical goods/tv’s etc. which are relatively cheap these days.

We’ve found old trowels and other tools, some broken and obviously discarded, and others perfect and apparently left behind the brickwork by accident: I wonder how long the original owner spend searching for them, or blaming his mates/children for taking them!?

Sometimes a coin, or a bit of scribble on the wall, or quite often a date and initials scratched in the mortar, no doubt by the builder. It can all be fascinating stuff, and fitting stone fireplaces has given us more than a few unexpected surprises!

This entry was posted on Friday, August 14th, 2009 at 10:35 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.