# Woodstock Fireview / Slate Hearth & Surround



## cbrodsky (Oct 1, 2006)

*copied from another thread - figured I should post it here...*

Here is a picture of my setup - I used 1/2” African slate for sides and back; 1/4” NY slate for floor. 

House was built in early 2002.  Originally, the area with the stove had the fridge and upper cabinet where the counter is currently located, and the rest of the space was a writing desk area with cabinets above and below.  Turned out in an upstairs loft/office, we had a recess 2” longer than the entire writing desk setup.  So, when I decided I wanted a woodstove last year, I pulled out all those cabinets, moved them upstairs into that location, moved the fridge over to current location swapping it with the section of base cabinet you see next to the half wall.  Amazingly, all this shuffling just happened to work.  To top it off, the pipe goes up through a space on 2nd floor that happened to have just the right class-A chimeny clearance after pulling a central A/C duct.  (roughed in but I don’t use) When planning this and doing the measurements and seeing how interchangeable everything was, I realized this was divine intervention that we were destined to put in wood heat.  Still a heck of a lot of work, but amazingly little new expense for all the moving stuff around and now I have an awesome office upstairs, it opened up the flow of the kitchen more, and let us get the stove centrally located. 

The floor is a stack of sheet metal, cement board, and 1/4” slate on subfloor.  Woodstock recommended using 1/2” non combustible material over sheet metal.  My stack is closer to 3/4” with the cement board, mortar and tile so it lines up flush with the surrounding hardwood floor.  I designed the tile floor such that it ended with a full strip of wood flooring.  This way I could rip out the floor roughly with a circular saw just inside the last piece of strip floor, but I didn’t have to make a straight saw cut all the way along the floor - allowed a very sharp clean edge.  For the diagonals and 90 deg. corner cutouts, I did what I could with the circular and then detailed it with a dremmel tool to get the corners nice and crisp.  The varigated african slate only comes in 1/2” thick so it would have sat too high, thus we used the simple 1/4” slate on the floor.  

For walls, used African "Silverblue".  Starting with 12x12s, I cut them into 6x6s and 6x12s and formed a pattern with it.  I used a $77 wet saw from Lowes - burned the first one up, returned, and second one made it through.  Other than really stressing a saw when cutting so much volume, it was very easy to manage - my first major tile project.  As others advised, more water is good on natural stone.  I cheated and used some mortar a bit too long - was getting too dry.  After a few long hot fires, a couple tiles were loose prior to grouting.  I ended up leaning on all of them hard to check for weakness and found total of 4 that I ended up using a high temp epoxy on.  Since that, no further issues for months of burning.

To install the stove, I balanced it on a floor jack with plywood on the lift pad to protect the bottom and rolled the floor jack on a piece of plywood to protect the floor.  Then I just dropped it right into place.

The half wall is just a dummy wall I built to back up to the counter, and tile wraps all around it.  This was the one that in another thread I mentioned gets quite toasty - I should have filled it with something to soak up even more heat. 

Back wall in center is mounted on 1” offset for extra wall protection, and then I decided to carry the half wall tile theme around the sides to end on the dropped header trim to the left side, topped it with base cap molding and did the rest out of 1x4 pine cut to size on sides, standard crown moulding at top, and 1x4 stock to make cap with cutout on top for heat flow behind offset wall.

The stove has been running since last October - took me until spring to get around to finishing up the grout and late this summer to complete the paint work where the cabinets used to sit hence a long delay in posting a picture  

Some advice I’d give is that anyone can do this stuff… just research it on the internet and plan carefully.  This was my first tile job other than a table once and I think it came out fine despite the one issue mentioned before which seems to have never come back.  Also, we saved a ton on the tile by going direct through a NYC distributor.  Our local tile shop wanted $8/SF plus tax plus significant $200+ shipping expense even though we were buying locally.  I thought that was ridiculous.  Online, we found it for $4/SF and had it delivered to a local freight dock for less than the local store was charging us to still have to pick it up at their store.  In the end, it was a miniature pallet with something like 10-12 boxes that they put on our pickup and we easily carried the individual boxes into the house.  Not a big deal at all and it gives you way more selection than HD.

-Colin


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## riguy (Oct 1, 2006)

That is just absolutely beautiful.  Awesome job!


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## njtomatoguy (Oct 1, 2006)

Wow!! 

Great job on the tile-

Bob


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## njtomatoguy (Oct 1, 2006)

Moderators- Edit if you must--

but that's just STOVE PORN


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## ourhouse (Oct 1, 2006)

Veryvery nice


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## Todd (Oct 2, 2006)

Great job! Love the tile and the wood floor. I bet that stove works great too?


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## cbrodsky (Oct 2, 2006)

Todd said:
			
		

> Great job! Love the tile and the wood floor. I bet that stove works great too?



Indeed Todd 

You can also see a bit from the photo that it is fairly central to the house and open to a lot of surrounding area - that really helps it heat the whole house nicely.  Hearth.com was really helpful in planning all of this - particularly the motivation to find a place in the middle of the house.

-Colin


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## scfa99 (Oct 2, 2006)

that is simply, awesome.


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## TedNH (Oct 2, 2006)

Hey that looks GREAT!
You know what makes it look good?  It doesnt look like you said one day "hey, I want a woodstove." and then just stuck it there.  
Looks great.  Good work!


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