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.
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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.
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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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