Astute readers may recall a column from last March wherein I described a visit to a bluestone quarry. We picked up a couple stones that day, a lintel stone and a hearth stone. Both were polished on one side and designed to fit the hand-cut stone Rumford fireplace I was building for VanKleeck.

With the living room stonework built and the stonework washed down with Muriatic acid, and with the floor in place – but as of yet without a final finish – we had a small window of opportunity to put down the hearth. No one would want to see the messy masons enter the room after the red oak floor was sanded and stained and sealed. In we went.

The slab of polished bluestone for the hearth is about 25 inches wide, by 68 inches in length, and over two inches thick. Yes, that’s right, it’s heavy. We put down a bed of sand on the area of poured cement we built on top of the stack we built from the cellar floor up and tamped the sand good. We brought the stone into the house out of Brian’s tractor bucket on rollers across the floor and lined it up with its final resting place and slid it across a couple short two by fours, so it was hovering directly over its final resting place. Well, not exactly. There is always a complication when setting something so big, you want to let it down once and never again, but that is rarely the case, and I think we had to lift that thing at least five times before we got it right. But there it is. Perfect.

The interior of the hearth, the portion directly below the fire, cannot be done in stone as it will crack, and I promised Brian to bring him some old used brick which really is the best material for such a job. They have already been cooked to 1200 degrees, have held up for one hundred or two hundred years, and have proven to be able to expand and contract without cracking. I had to run and get honey ready for the garlic festival in Saugerties, and so I gave Brian his instructions in laying out the brick and cutting it to fit the floor of the firebox.

He did a great job, and we took it all out, as it was a temporary test, and we reset them in the rubber-mallet-pounded sand and set in the cast-iron ash-pit trap he wants there in the firebox, and I tamped it all level to the bluestone portion and sucked it all down with cups of water to soak down any remaining sand between the tight joints of the bricks as no mortar was used. Everything is now keyed to the fine molding around the bluestone and the floor, all level. Nothing to trip over and fall into the fire!

The thing about Rumford fireplaces is that they are reputed to be the most efficient fireplaces ever built. It’s all in the design of having a shallow fireplace, with a high opening, and sharply slanted cove sides radiating heat into the room, all without a whisper of smoke. I will not bore you with the technicals.

The opening of this fireplace is 42 inches by 42 inches, or thereabouts, and it could have been an inch or two more shallow than the current 16 inches, but why press it? I will let you know when we test it.

This weekend, October 14 and 15, don’t forget The Shawangunk Valley Firehouse Craft Fair, and on Sunday, the Rosendale Pickle Festival – this year at the Ulster Country Fairgrounds. Hope to see you there.