LESLIE: Glen in Florida listens to The Money Pit on WCOA. And Glen, you have an interesting question. You want to add a chimney to your house in Florida?
GLEN: Yes. We have a slab “on grade” brick veneer house that has a package fireplace that’s surrounded … it’s in brick until it gets to the roof line. And at that point, then the … it’s just a stovepipe in the package fireplace that goes up about four feet and that’s it. What we would like to do is to encase that in brick all the way up.
TOM: Okay. That’s, basically, a brick … a façade that you’re going to want to build. It sounds to me like you have a zero clearance fireplace – one that’s an insulated prefabricated kind – and the metal vent pipe that’s going up throughout the middle is probably a triple wall stainless pipe. And so, when this sticks out the top, you want to kind of fake it and make it look like a brick structure. And builders do that, from time to time.
Basically, all that is is a plywood structure that has a cap on it where the vent pipe comes right through. And it’s flashed against the roofing shingles with step flashing. And then they use a brick veneer on the surface of it. So it’s basically just a cosmetic attachment to your roof structure to make it look like brick.
So that’s basically what you’d have to do. You’d have to build a wood box and then do a brick veneer on top of that.
GLEN: Okay. I was worried about the weight of the brick veneer.
TOM: No, because it’s very, very thin; is the way you would do it. You might even do it with stucco scored to look like brick.
LESLIE: There’s actually a company – it’s called Eldorado Stone – and they have a new product that’s launching right now which is a brick veneer. And it’s really lightweight and it looks exactly like brick. And you can get it in sort of any coloration and any tone to make it look like brick that you’ve seen in a firehouse or brick that you’ve seen in a loft in Manhattan. And you should check out their website because it might be worth your while to look into a veneer like that, instead.
GLEN: Eldorado Stone.
LESLIE: Mm-hmm, eldoradostone.com.
TOM: Thanks so much for calling us at 888-MONEY-PIT.
Leave a Reply