The Ancient Basement–All the Stone is UP

Oh my goodness. This was so much work! We got a little momentum going from finishing the platform under the stove, but then it was time for the walls of the closets and the wall behind the stove.

First things first, we put down Ram board to protect the floor of the platform from stray mortar.

I had to be careful to cover the air pipe and the gas line.

Then we installed screws for the fireplace tool holder. I wrapped the screws with painters tape and then put a large diameter straw over the top to keep the grout out.

The last piece of prep work was to put up a piece of OSB so that we can recess the stove pipe flange into the stone when it’s complete. This was a little involved but not terrible.

Here are photos of our progress.

We also had to go back and put the rock around the beams that we installed last fall. That was so much work because of all the trimming to get them to fit.

Next it was time to grout everything. Our first batch was really runny and we made kind of a mess with it. We got about half of the stone around the wood stove platform done on the first day. But then we took a couple days off because we had a friend in town. I was super tired from all the hosting we did over the holiday weekend, so Mike did the last bits by himself. He really did a beautiful job. I’m so happy with how it’s turning out.

Here are the beams:

And here is the original drawing of what we envisioned around the stove:

And here is where we are now:

It’s just amazing how much difference the grout makes in the finished product. We will be working to get all the mess cleaned up and fixing a few areas. Then we need to get the air grates installed permanently, the tool holder put up, and the stove put in place. Then it’s on to finishing up the doors (sanding, finish, hardware and getting them installed permanently. I will post about those next steps, because it’s actually quite a lot of work, even though the results won’t be earth shattering or anything.

The next projects will be finishing up everything that we have started, so it will take a lot of time, but the results won’t be very dramatic. I’m concerned that if we don’t finish up these details as we go, we’ll get to the end and have a ZILLION details to finalize and that won’t be fun.