On Thursday the 25th, we finally banished the old fashioned gas fire from our house. (Yipee!) The fire, as horrendous as it was, was nothing compared to the outdated red brick surround that not only adorned the chimney breast but also extended around the alcoves too.

One of our first thoughts as we viewed the property in Janurary was of making sure that there was no sign that such an abomination had ever existed in our house.

So we had the gas disconnected by a Gas Safe plumber, took the old fire to the dump and purchased a sledge hammer. It remained that way for almost a fortnight until yesterday (7th July ’15) when we had an electrician over. The power needed to be turned off whilst the tradesman worked and as Paul was supposed to be working from home he couldn’t do much without his computer. We decided to make the most of our time and we finally unpacked that sledge hammer, shared the one pair of gloves and safety goggles between us and we whacked the crap out of the fireplace.

Actually, at the start we didn’t whack the crap out of it, we sort of hit one brick, removed it, hit the next brick and removed that and we tried to keep all the rubble off of the carpet. However it was quite slow going and it wasn’t as satisfying as I imagined knocking it out would be. Anyway, once we saw the mess inside and in behind the bricks that we had to clean up, we didn’t care so much.  I passed the hammer back to Paul and he was a bit more effective at hitting lots of bricks very hard.

By this time, it was starting to get a bit late. The electrician was finished for the day, but as we’d unplugged the WiFi and stored away our TV, there wasn’t much else to do. having decided that I don’t want to fall out with our neighbours I sent Paul over at 18:00 to let them know that once it reached 20:00 we’d stop all work. Thankfully by quarter to eight we’d done and I hoovered and the carpet looked at clean as it did on Saturday. Phew! Maybe we’ll have to take over some home made treats to say thanks for putting up with the racket!

Here are some of the things we found inside the surround:

 Over the weekend, Paul was working on the Saturday and my parents very kindly came up to help me out (they live about an hour away). They took me out for a very nice lunch which we ate in the sun (I got very sunburned) then whilst my dad mowed the lawn for us and hacked at some of our overgrown and unwanted bushes, my mother hoovered and shampooed our living room and dining room carpet. It was only as we were sat reading some of my Ideal Home magazine collection (looking for fireplace ideas) and waiting for it to dry that we remembered that we needed to knock out the fire surround to install some power points and that the carpet was going to get very dirty very soon.