Sunday, December 27, 2009

Getting punchy again

It's been a crazy couple of weeks - I was in San Francisco for work, and got stuck there an extra two days because of giant snowstorm #1, which shut down the east coast airports. Luckily, I got home just as giant snowstorm #2 pummeled the middle of the country.

So, we've been laying pretty low. Our goal for holiday break is to work on the old punch list again, and after catching up on sleep after the jet-lagged, red-eye-flight, airport-dwelling beginning of the week, we started on a couple of those tasks.

Sorry readers, it's going to be a while still till our next big project - our bedroom. We pushed it back to March break - it'll just work better. Anyways, Item 1 on the punch list was to finally put a surround around our pellet stove. See, when we bought the stove, there were two different sets of dimensions for our model, depending on which piece of literature you had in your hand. We knew that it would either just barely or not quite fit all the way back in the firebox. Turns out, it doesn't quite fit in the firebox - the back of the 'finished' part of the stove sticks out about an inch from the brick surround.

We wanted to avoid any giant, tacky surround piece (like the big brass or black frame sold by the stove shop), so we've been just waiting for a solution to pop up. We decided to figure something out just before I left, and went to the big box with the idea of finding something metal we could tuck behind the stove and paint black to make it fade away.

Then, Ken happened upon a random piece of someone's roof flashing, in a custom reddish-copper color. We thought it would closely match the brickwork, and we snapped it up (it was marked down from $18 to $5.25, and the woman rang it up for $4.71, so the price was right).

Using the existing lengthwise bend to fit it against the stove back's 'lip', we cut it to size with tin snips...

...and brought in some clamps and wood to make a break for bending the metal to fit in the firebox, but were one piece short & too lazy to go back to the garage, so we used a copy of "Swan's Way" as the final piece of the metal brake. Thanks, Proust!

Though we planned to use liquid nails to tack it to the brick, it 'sticks' just fine with no adhesive so far, so it ended up being a really simple, easy, tidy, quick project.

And, now we won't have escaping pellets falling down behind the stove anymore - finally!

2 comments:

Alexis said...

As usual, you two come up with a lovely solution through patience and ingenuity.

Happy holidays! Hope to see you soon (perhaps we'll be able to make it up to Bangor in Feb again this year).

Holyoke Home said...

Le sigh. But I just found you. And now I have to wait until March for the next big project?

Okay. I understand. I'll start reading Proust, and maybe I'll be finished by then :)