Take a perfectly lovely, plastered white wall - and take a saw to it. Why not get? Better than eating onto the loungeroom for the wood oven, right? Our living area is fairly small, so every centimetre counts.

The recess must have been on the original plans for a fire, but never got that far. We did see evidence it may have been used as a gas fire, but when we bought the place, it had an electric fire built into the plaster. We removed it and plastered it over as originally we thought it'd go somewhere else. It seems a bit crazy to be doing this for two feet of floorspace but believe me every bit of loungeroom matters! Plus it'll be a really cool feature of the house.

We were a little nervous cutting in as Jamie was worried we wouldn't have enough room as per regulations for wood ovens, but in for a penny in for a pound as they say. He ended up ringing the stove company in town who said it should be fine and it sounded like Jamie knew what he was doing, so that gave him a little more confidence. Before long we were left with just the framing. Jamie had to build a lintel for the support for the studs coming down for the ceiling (sorry if I have the wrong terminology) and we had a carpenter neighbour pop by to look up at the roof and tell us what to do about the pinions holding the tin on the ceiling right where the flue was going to go as per the image below.

That was a matter of cutting them out and putting some bracing to the left and right, which he found in a builder's skip down the road - bonus!

Of course, Jamie threatened to plaster me into the wall, Edgar Allen Poe stylie...if you're not familiar with the The Cask of Amontillado, it tells the story of Montresor, who seeks revenge against Fortunato for an unspecified insult. He lures the drunken Fortunato into his catacombs with the promise of rare wine, chains him to a wall, and buries him alive. Jamie did not like me telling him this story when he was in the alcove.

After some effort, it finally looked like this. Now I'm sure you're wondering why we don't just leave it as brick, but it's only a single skin so the heat will escape right out. It would be super cool as double brick, BUT the sub floor is actually pine floorboards, so it wouldn't hold the weight. If we plastered it and painted it white, it'd have that fresh scandi look we were after. Damn, though, I kinda really like this rustic look!

So, Jamie was onto the framing. We put some aluminium studs in the back and some fire proof cement sheeting, and then he made some stud boxes for the plaster on either side (or just boxes, as he said, because he's the stud that made them, haha).

This is the wood oven we'll be putting in it - if you missed it, we picked it up for a bargain from Marketplace - less than half the price. We will be getting an insulated flue and putting some bluestone pavers down as the hearth. Hopefully we'll be lighting a fire over the Easter weekend but that might be amibitious! Let's see if it ends up anything like the Chat GPT image hey?

Still, he has to do the plastering and the painting. These things take time. It'll be worth it though I think! Before long it'll be winter and we'll be cosying up in front of the fire, with a stew bubbling on top and feeling rather smug - me because i've got a clever husband, and him feeling rather clever for building our little fire alcove.