Demolishing the Not-So-Old Fireplace
This is the job that I’d most wanted to do in the house, ever since our first viewing. The previous owners had an electric or gas fire here, which sat atop a modern brick hearth. They had removed the fire and filled in the hole, but the hearth made me shudder just to look at it – ever take a totally unreasonable dislike to something?! So Richard happily donned his goggles (closely followed by me – I love a good bit of demolition!) and set to work with our newly acquired set of pry bars (THE most essential piece of kit for any renovator!) and mallet (don’t use a hammer if you want to retain your hearing – the sound of metal hitting metal is not pleasant!).
After fighting off a massive false widow spider (yuck!), he started to knock the bricks out, revealing that they were sitting on a bed of crumpled Daily Mail from 14th April 1986. So that dated the monstrosity to the 80’s – another piece of the house puzzle solved, and a satisfying job done!
