Whitehall

Things have been busy, with interior framing, rough-ins, and the wood stove installation. The last post showed creating the wood stove hearth. The masons have been here and finished the wall behind the wood stove. I moved the stove into place and cut the connector pipe for the fresh air intake. Bay Stoves supplied the stove pipe and did the install. I preferred that they climb up on the roof and work on the scaffolding to install the flue. Installing the exterior stove pipe Jotul 400 Wood Stove and Flue We did a good job of aligning the hearth, the wall, and the wood stove. Everything went together as it should. The flue goes straight up through the roof. It is about 25ft of flue, mostly double wall flue pipe. Only the first four foot section is single-wall stove pipe. The fresh air intake works great, preventing warm inside air from feeding the fire. It will also prevent the cool inside air from leaving the house in the summer. We have a big pile of scrap lumber and the woo

We've been working on the Jotul 400 wood stove hearth for several days. Since it will be very visible, it is taking a while to get everything just right. The stove manual says that the bottom heat shield allows us to just use a layer of non-combustible material under the stove. But we feel better by making a more heat-resistant hearth. The subflooring is 7/8 inch Advantech engineered oriented strand board (OSB). On top of that we glued 1/2 inch of Micore 300, a mineral fiber insulating product (R1.1 for the 1/2 inch). The next layer is 1/4 inch Durock fiber cement board, attached to the Micore with Versabond thin-set mortar applied with a 1/4 inch x 1/4 inch grid mortar trowel. We bought slate tile (real slate, not an engineered product) at Home Depot called Montauk Blue. They have it in several sizes. We needed both 12 inch square and 16 inch square to fit the hearth. We have a wet saw, which makes cutting tile a breeze. Well, today was a bit cooler than a breeze. The water that