Masonry Heater with Clay and Stone facing, Worcester, Vermont

Hi folks and friends! This is my most recent masonry stove, built in Worcester, Vermont. It is a retrofit, and is heating a partially earth-covered home that is being renovated. The fieldstone is from a local source, and the finish is in American Clay, skip troweled, with two shades of the color Moab. Hope you like it!
Also this year, and not yet pictured on my blog, I have done clay plastering of walls and ceilings in two rooms and a stairwell in a home here in north-central Vermont. I enjoyed that project very much, and hope to do more clay plaster work. It is a wonderful substitute for paint. I hope to get some pictures to show you! Other projects have included renovating an old brick fireplace with a new stone face and integrating some wood cabinetry and mantle, and a soapstone hearth and lintel stone. Another renovation was re-finishing some cinder-block chimney-tops with a new stone face and stone rain caps.
Happy Thanksgiving!
~Michael

Custom brick hearth space, Middlesex, Vermont

Here's a sampling of pictures from my most recent work, a custom hearth space between living room and kitchen, built around an already-built cinder-block chimney. On the kitchen side, the big soapstone stove is set up on a raised hearth at a nice angle, with a green-granite counter just above it. On the living room side there is a gas fireplace/heater, adding to the warmth of the space with heat and fire-light. The kitchen, living room, and dining room were all transformed by this project, creating a much warmer feeling for the house, figuratively and literally.

How do you attach a wood post to brick and stone?

Nice firewood storage.

Inspired by Gaudi

The kitchen stove on it's new pad

Bring the wood

Living room side

The brick mantle with arch

Pictures from Wolcott: Masonry heater, Rumford fireplace, cookstove, chimney...

Greetings! everyone, here are some pictures from 2009's big project out in Wolcott, Vermont. These are the last ones I took before my camera stopped working, and the work has since been completed and cleaned up, and a lot more progress was made with the rest of the house. So I'll be hoping to get some better pics when a new camera comes into my life. The picture above is the first fire in the semi-circular double-bell (masonry heater) that sits slightly above and back-to-back with the Rumford fireplace you will see in the pictures below. This project also includes a hearth for a wood-burning cookstove and hookups for small wood stoves into the chimney upstairs, one in each bedroom. Essentially, it is a huge tower right in the center of a 12-sided home.
Michael's first hand-built semi-circular double-bell masonry heater

Nothing like cooking with wood fire too!

What you'd see (before finished floor) from the kitchen, or from the hearth of the fireplace.

Wish I could keep it!

In one of the 2 Bedrooms

The 2x4 studs are gone now. Top of stairs hallway.

Chimney top.

'The Center': Masonry heater and Rumford fireplace ...masonry in Wolcott, VT

over the fireplace arch

finally some real sq. footage on the stone work

getting ready for the arch

my first 'convex' arch!

Bluestone bench top

Convex stone bench front

Rumford Fireplace Guts

Bell 1


Bell 1 and bell 2

The Center

Masonry Heater with local stone and clay plaster finish, Marshfield, VT

Here's some fresh pictures of the Masonry Heater I built in Marshfield, Vermont this summer. The clay plaster is still drying in some of these photos.

Masonry Heater core and brick facing, hand built in Cabot, Vermont

Some pictures of another masonry heater I'm building in Cabot. This one is a retro-fit, faced with KF Heritage D bricks, along with a new 2-flue brick chimney for the house. It has an oven and bread warming nook on the kitchen side and the firebox on the living room side, with wood storage between the heater and chimney, and a stainless steel water coil for heating domestic hot water.