Adding a Fireplace to a Pleasant Grove Home

No chimney required

A direct-vent gas fireplace is a sealed appliance. The glass front is gasketed and the firebox never opens to the room. It breathes through a single pipe within a pipe that runs to the outside, drawing combustion air in through the outer passage and pushing exhaust out through the inner one. Because the combustion chamber is closed, it does not compete with the house for air, it does not care what the furnace or the range hood is doing, and it does not need a vertical masonry chimney to work.

What that means practically is that a fireplace can go in a room that never had one. A basement family room, a bedroom, an addition on the back of the house, a finished space over a garage. The requirement is a route to an exterior wall or roof that stays within the manufacturer's limits for total length and number of bends, and a terminal placed the correct distance from windows, doors, soffits, decks and grade. That last set of clearances is not negotiable, and it is the reason we look at the outside of the house before deciding where the unit goes inside it.

Working with what the bench homes already have

That split runs right through Pleasant Grove. The older brick houses on the original town streets usually have a real masonry firebox worth lining and keeping, while the subdivisions climbing the bench above them almost all have a factory-built unit sitting in a framed chase.

Where there is an existing fireplace, most of the work here is replacement rather than new installation. The houses built through this city's growth years generally have a factory-built firebox in a framed chase, and those units are now old enough that owners are ready for something better. The chase is usually reusable. What changes is the framing inside it, because a new appliance has its own clearance requirements and its own vent path, and it very rarely drops into the space the old one left.

Where there is an existing masonry fireplace, an insert is normally the better value. The old chimney becomes the route for a properly sized liner and the masonry structure stays exactly as it is, which is why converting costs a fraction of building new.

Getting the room right

The mistake we see most is choosing an appliance from a photograph and discovering the clearances afterward. Combustible mantels, floating shelves and television recesses all have published minimum distances above the opening, and manufacturers publish them because somebody measured where the wood above starts to char. We would rather establish those numbers with you at the start than deliver bad news after the tile has been chosen. Installations are permitted and inspected, which is the documentation you will want when the house is sold.