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.
