Second Fireplace

To be honest, this is not a much better record of a fireplace installation that yesterday's effort. However, I did manage to picture the kit of parts before anything started:

The basic process appears to be to :

1. Lay the hearth slabs on a bed of mortar.
2. Install the lining slabs, which I think are stuck in place with some kind of oil based brown mastic (presumably heat resistant).
3. Fix the "legs" of the fire surround and attach to the wall with more mastic and metal angle brackets.
4. Lay the top across, and again fix with brackets and mastic.
5. Grout all the joints.

It is not very clear in this picture, but the top of the leg has a housing cut out of it, for a 90 degree angle bracket to be attached. You can see the rawl-plugs in the wall that this will be attached to. In the "header stone", similar cutouts are present as clearance for the bracket.

For this fireplace, the header stone is very heavy and the fitters needed my help to lift it. We used an old metal frame that I have in the garage to hold storage bins, as a temporary resting place at about the right height :

Once again, I missed any more of the details of the fitting. Here is the end result:

Compare with the ply and cardboard version that I built last summer (opens in new window). We have scaled down the design a little, and made it less top heavy. We both think it looks better for it, and the couple of hours spent making the mock-up was well worth the effort.