A fellow can only take so much pressure.   For  twenty years we had a perfectly decent freestanding gas stove in our family room.  It  always worked, never failed, and heated the  entire  lower floor of our house very cheaply. 



As you can see, it was a thing of beauty and simplicity.  At its 20 year service, the mechanic said "this thing is built like a tank, the insides look like new." 

These were not the words my wife wanted to hear.  She, and all the other women in my life, hated the stove, hated the brick, and were beginning to hate its defender.  Pressure mounted as grandchildren came along, with fear mongering claims of
young toddlers accidentally falling into the hot stove.  "Well," I economically replied to no avail, "they'd only do that once."  

Then, in 2019 we visited the Libecap's in their newly renovated craftsman heritage home. 
And inside was Ann, the indefatigable promoter of  Victorian husband household  industry (along with some nice cabinets).

         

When my wife saw the fireplace and built in bookshelves, and listened to Ann whisper "I'm sure Doug could do this in a few weekends," that was it. All the way home from Montana the case was made for having something similar.

I protested, and pointed out that furnace intakes, electrical outlets, gas lines, thermostats, and built in vacuums would have to be moved. Furthermore, the hardwood floor would have to be patched, bricks removed, etc., but, it made  no difference. Who was I
against Erin and Ben Napier of Home Town on HGTV.   They handled all these sorts of things in six minutes during a commercial break on TV.  "How hard could it be?" my wife asked.

So, I started in October, and worked night and day to get the fireplace in by Christmas.

Note the missing marble on the left.  While screwing in the left leg from the back I mismeasured and drilled through the marble!  I cried for three days.  I took the piece back to the mason and (of course) he had no other similar piece to replace it. So I paid another $200 for him to glue it together.  As soon as I got the piece back home, I lifted it gently out of the car ... and it broke again.  Frustrated, I bought some Gorilla Glue for $3.99, and glued it myself.  That seemed to work.

Next came the bookshelves. I decided to build them in the shop and move them in. This involved building something square and plumb, and then moving it into a space that is not square, plumb, or level.  More challenges. What really hurt though, was painting all of my solid wood.  Here is what one looked like before:



One day, long after I'm gone, someone will strip this down and say (in the same manner we now ridicule those who carpeted over hardwood) "what fool painted beautiful wood?"

Eventually, all things come to an end.  Here is the final shot ... in May 2020. An eight month project, budgeted at six minutes.



Note strategic placement of vase to hide marble crack.  I'm most proud about the floor repair. Three rows of boards had to be added, finger jointing them from both sides. The tricky part was that the tongue ran along the opposite side of the board on either side of the old brick.  How did I do that? Trade secret.

Although it is an "effecient" fireplace, given that it is contained inside the framing, it mostly heats up the wall.  The room is much colder, and our heatng bill is over twice as high as before. So on a cost benefit ratio, it is hard to know if this project was more or less wasteful than the Covid19 lockdown.

Here I am, giving Gary Libecap the evil eye, telling him, "Do you know what you you cost me?"

As a final act of revenge, I made a little carving of Gary, holding the second best book on property rights, and with his parrot Savanna on his shoulder.

  The resemblance is uncanny.