Situation: small San Francisco house with small living room; corner fireplace built when house was built in 1949; lived here 16 years and never used it; has dedicated chimney; hearth and floor of fireplace about 3" above floor level, from what I have seen this is made of concrete; not necessary (I hope) to remove chimney above the ceiling.
Benefits of removing the fireplace are increased space and more furniture arranging possibilities in our small living room. Also decorating possibilities.
Drawbacks are maybe it is too difficult for DIY so might have to pay a professional, will need to lay flooring in corner to match room (narrow oak strips with design around hearth), may lower value of house (or could raise it, I don’t know how that space counts in the square footage calculations).
Has anyone done this or had it done, with a real brick fireplace/chimney arrangement? All the videos I can find online deal with what are basically enclosed stoves with flues, so the fireplace was not an integral part of the home’s construction.
We had a gas insert installed in our wood-burner in our last house. Still didn’t use it all that much, but at least when you shut it off, it’s OFF, and if your furnace ever goes out during winter, it’s a good alternate heat source. Removing one shouldn’t be all that difficult, just laborious. The flue could just be capped, instead of removed.
If you remove the fireplace but leave the chimney above it, what’s to keep the chimney from collapsing? Isn’t it resting on the fireplace? For that reason, I recommend you get a professional involved before you do anything.
Good point, now that you mention it. I suppose it would be possible to install wood structure above the ceiling to hold up the chimney, but that also sounds like a job for a professional.
If you find it’s too expensive too get rid of, and you have access to a gas line, I suggest you consider adding gas log set (they’re different than a gas insert). We had a fireplace in our home which we didn’t need for heat. The ambiance was nice, but getting wood in the city was an expensive pain in the ass and dirty.
Gas* log sets* are designed to look exactly like a real wood fireplace, they have hand painted logs (from birch to oak to driftwood) and glowing vermiculite “embers” at the bottom.
They’re as efficient (or inefficient) as real wood and they’re about 1/3 the price of an insert. Inserts are deigned to be very efficient and pump heat into your room with blower fans etc - essentially they’re second furnaces.
When we have guests over for the first time, it’s common at the end of the night they ask if the fireplace has real wood. They usually notice that I never add wood.
Below is the company we went with, but there are several out there.
That’s all nice and I appreciate the information, but it’s not what I was talking about. I want to recapture the space currently taken up by a fireplace that we have never used, not so much because we couldn’t but because we never needed or wanted to.
We’ve been talking about doing this, too. The fireplace combined with a bay window makes one whole side of our family room mostly unusable for putting furniture there, or art or other decor on the wall. We never us it and it just takes up space. We had considered the idea of just taking the bricks off the wall and floor and filling in the hole, leaving the actual fireplace unit and chimney in place, but we have not looked into how that could be done yet.
Estimates are usually free, and you have the opportunity to ask all the questions you want. Get 3 estimates to do the work and talk to them about whether this is something you can/should tackle yourself.