- Home -

- Forum -

How Chicken-wire and Concrete Solved My Problems

by Mark S. Chenail   

As some of you may know from reading my Missouri Journal, I have been building a house on my 12 acre Ozark paradise for a number of years now.  It is, as the professional procrastinators say, “a work in progress”.  Some years, it has progressed very quickly and we have managed to accomplish a great deal and in other years, we have managed to finish very little.  This year, we are making every effort to finish the exterior and get the whole structure closed in, so that we can possibly, occupy the house this winter and work on the interior details.  Most of the house will be sided in Hardi-Board siding, a simple and easy solution, but there are some areas, where we would like to use some alternative treatments for both practical and aesthetic reasons.  The major project is finishing off the false chimneys that disguise the triple wall stove pipes that are attached to our woodstove and the zero clearance fireplaces.

The front of the house is dominated by two enormous false chimney shafts.  They are 4’ x 8’ and about 20’ tall.  One of them houses the fireplace in the living room and an auxiliary furnace closet that holds an electric garage furnace that someone gave me for nothing.  The other shaft handles fireplaces in the master bedroom and the guest room above it and some closet space.  Ideally, I would have gathered sufficient stone from my property and built honest, fully functional, stone chimneys.  These two gray stone behemoths would have risen  out of the ground and anchored  the whole house.  However, as I am well past the bloom of my own  youth and neither blessed with strong energetic sons or friends who will work for beer,  I have had to come up with a simpler and less costly method of achieving the same look.  

The chimneys are basically just big wooden shafts, conventionally framed and sheathed in OSB.  The bases are going to be sided in Hardi-Board, where they are part of the wall surface.  But from the cornice line up, I wanted something with a more rugged texture.  I thought about that faux stone you see plastered on every other surburban cottage going up in a subdivision near you, but it is wildly expensive and doesn’t bear close inspection.  It just looks phoney and I was afraid the house would look like a Motel that featured “an authentic cowboy experience.”  Mutton dressed as lamb as the English say.

                         Faux Stone                                                          Cedar Shingles 

Then, I got the idea of using cedar shingles.  There was plenty of precedent for this in American 19^th century domestic architecture.  New  England and the Jersey shore are overrun with stick and shingle houses that are a riot of shingled decorative surfaces.  I thought about doing the chimneys in oversized rough shingles with a copper cap on top for contrast.  But again, the cost of cedar shingles was prohibitive and their application is labor intensive.  As most of these shingles will be going on a surface that is, at least, 12 -16 feet above the ground, it was going to require a lot of waltzing around with long ladders or building scaffolds and sliding about on metal roofs.  For obvious reasons, this is not a job for me (wheelchair bound roofers are extremely rare) and neither Jon nor Levi is particularly keen on heights.  And Jon pointed out that there was a possible fire danger as well.  A metal capping on the shafts would help prevent fires, but there was still a chance that a stray spark could set the chimneys ablaze.  And shingles didn’t give me the right amount of texture and contrast that I had envisioned in my minds eye.

                          Random Slabs                                                      Cut Board Ends

I next considered using random slab siding, the sort that is cut right from the log and the edges are left wavy and in some cases still covered in bark.  I thought that perhaps these could be laid like clapboard siding and stained gray.  I’d seen this done on other houses and at a distance it almost looks like flat slab stone walls, particularly if the slabs are  random widths.  But up close,  most of the effect was lost and I ultimately rejected this idea, at least for the chimneys.  I’d also seen a house, here in town, that had a little gable roof porch over the front door,  that was sided in left over boards. Most  of the boards were 1x6 or 1x8 of various short lengths and they had been put up like cedar shingles. The effect was really quite interesting, very textured, very random and there was little doubt that the materials were all end cuts from other projects that had been saved in the shed, until the homeowner came up with a use for them.  But even this little gable must have taken a couple of days to finish and the thought of my two monster chimneys was daunting on many levels.   I may still try this on my own porch gables, but I rejected it for the chimneys.

Then someone suggested that I use another product made by the Hard-Plank people.  It comes in 4x8 sheets and has a rough cementicious surface that looks like a smooth cross between adobe and stucco.  It wasn’t too expensive, considering the cost of most sheet goods these days and the 4x8 sheets would cover a lot of area quickly and add stability to the structure.  Unfortunately, they weighed a ton.  Getting the sheets up a ladder and in place was going to be a major effort, not to mention,  holding them up, while you screwed them in place.  And then you would have to fill the screw holes, so they didn’t show,  and paint the surface to give it some character. I went and looked at the stuff at Lowe’s and seriously gave it some consideration. But, bluntly put, it just looked flat and boring, like that Dri-Vit stucco that is used all over the country on cheap commercial structures.  It just didn't have any soul, no life of its own.

Then the other day, I was chewing the fat, down at the local cafe, with my older and wiser neighbors and I mentioned my chimney dilemma.  After ruminating a bit, one of them suggested I try ferro-concrete or as he called it chicken wire and cement. 

“Any fool or his mother can put the stuff up,” he observed, over the rim of his coffee mug. “I’ve even seen little kids working the stuff,  patching foundations and making little dog coops and such. If you can make mud pies or throw cow patties, you can do chicken wire cement.”

As I often do, when conversing with my patient neighbors, I admitted to a total lack of knowledge when it comes to chicken wire cement.  I may be college educated and classically schooled in the best tradition, but my education is sorely lacking, when it comes to practical applications.  I am hopeless with all kinds of engines and barely able to change the tires on my wheelchair without a manual, so this state of affairs came as no surprise to my long suffering neighbors.  They are used to my blank looks and  now come prepared, not only with useful suggestions, but with detailed instructions and  practical demonstrations.  I lucked out in the case of chicken wire cement.  Although it was the newest thing  since the I-pod,  as far as I was concerned,  it was as common as dirt all over the surrounding country side, if I cared to come and take a look.  One neighbor had used chicken wire cement to parge round the basement of his house in 1972 and hadn’t had to touch the stuff since, except for minor cosmetic repairs.  Another was the proud owner of a fish pond,  that his father had passed on to him along with his other worldly goods.  The aged P had built the pond  himself, using a sort of free form design that was reminiscent of the amoeba swimming pools of the 1950s.  Still another neighbor had a small shed that was built completely of  chicken wire concrete over a standard frame of 2x4’s covered in tarpaper.  In fact, even the roof was made of this versatile and ubiquitous material.   From what they were telling me, this could be the answer to my chimney dilemmas.   It was structurally strong and durable, it was relatively light weight, it required no special tools or skills and best of all, it was cheap to do.  I and the boys agreed to meet the next day and take a look at these various examples of chicken wire concrete and I went home to do a bit of basic research on ferro-concrete.

Concrete is basically a mixture of  lime, sand or gravel aggregate and water.  It’s the lime that makes the difference and puts this above simple mud.  The ancient Egyptians used a mortar made with gypsum, sand and water in the Pyramids, as early as 3000 BC. and went on to produce stronger products made with lime in place of gypsum.  On the other side of the world, the Chinese were using a similar mixture to build the Great Wall.  The Greeks produced lime mortars that were extremely durable, but it was the Romans that brought concrete to a whole new level of use.  The Romans used pozzolana cement from Pozzuoli, Italy near Mt. Vesuvius to build many famous structures, including the Appian Way, the Baths of Caracalla, the vaults of the great Basilicas in the Forum, the dome of the Pantheon and miles of aqueducts.

Continued

Home    1    2     Next