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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 19th 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.

   

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