We fired up the fireplace for the first time since we bought the house. We visited a fireplace company last weekend and priced out a new fireplace *sigh*. $10,000 to rebuild our double sided fireplace. It’s probably one of the best investments in a home in the current market (everyone seems to want a fireplace) but it is now very low on our priority list since it’s perfectly usable. Instead we went to a big box store and bought the cheapest fireplace screens we could find and fired her up tonight!
The only real issue we could see with using the fireplace in an "open" configuration (eg: without glass doors on both sides) is the potential for smoke in the house. Well it did smoke a lot, but I mark that up to the horrible wood we purchased up the street at Jewel. It’s practically green and smoked like the dickens, but we wanted to try it out tonight and didn’t have much of another option. But that was a good thing after all. With the air circulation running on the air-conditioner (it runs 24×7 since we have an air purification unit) it was causing enough "wind" in the house to draw the smoke towards the air intake in the dinning room. When we turned the air blower off it drafted nicely up the chimney. Looks like we’ll be able to put off spending $10,000 until some other time. Yeah!
The girls had a good time roasting marshmallows. I mean…what else is a fire good for when you are 4 years old?