Better Home and GardenA Home Improvement blog

Fireplaces are our best friend especially during winter. They are not simply a warming instrument, but are also a great addition to our interior design. Building your fireplace is not all about the visible heart but is also about the chimney. Building your fireplace chimney can be as easy as 1 2 3 if you will just follow the following easy steps mentioned below.

Building your chimney can be started by ensuring that your chimney measures at a minimum of 4 inches larger in all sides than the flue. You must see to it that, wood, kindling, and other material that tend to travel up to the chimney must be at least 2 inches away from the chimney’s exterior with the exterior at a minimum of 1-inch from the wall.
After measuring, it is not time for you to frame the flue then size up the chimney and start building. The flue is made of several small rectangular blocks that are stacked. Around the structure is where the chimney is built.

Next is to do the masonry job. This can be the hardest part of building a chimney. One must set each brick or cement block in place and have in on the same level with the fresh layer of mortar to have it harden to the structure and will not fall down. Doing this requires some training for several months.

After you have built your chimney indoor, it is now time for you to cut through ceiling and the roof. It is important that chimney must extend all the way to the roof and above. With this requirement, cutting into your existing ceilings and the roof is necessary when building your chimney to an existing home. Obviously cutting is not necessary for newly built home as they can have the chimney included in the plan. The cutting process can be done using a Sawzall or any similar tool. One must manage to remove all insulation and flooring. If possible, it is advisable to build an exterior chimney in order to avoid the cutting job.

After you have built your chimney, it is now time for you to extend your chimney to your basement. If you are using and existing chimney and flue upstairs, then you can add another fireplace to your basement room. All you have to do is to connect the two chimneys, and this can be done by building a chimney up to the backside of your existing fireplace and eventually breaking it through to connect the flues.

You can also keep your chimney sturdy enough even when natural calamities like earthquake happens by putting a #4 reinforcing bar in your chimney’s corners. However, the best place for your reinforcing bar is in the bricks’ cells by grouting it. If in some reasons, you were not able to place the reinforcing bars in the cells of your chimney bricks, you can have them placed between the flue liner and the rest of the bricks around.

The final steps, wrap the flue liners with ceramic fiber paper socks to seal the area.