I mentioned a couple of posts ago that the fireplace in my front parlor used to have shutters on it.
This is the fireplace, now without shutters:
(And a very large cat.) I looked in vain for a photo of the fireplace with shutters, but there was none to be found. When my computer crashed last fall, I lost most of the photos of what the house looked like when I moved in. Anyhow, the shutters covered over that wallpaper in the middle of the mantel and were nailed to the top edge of its opening. (You can see the nail holes if you bigify the photo.)
The shutters looked like this, only crappy:
And painted white. With pieces of scotch tape all over them. And there were four of these shutters nailed onto the fireplace. No, I don't know why. Maybe to cover up the wallpaper, which I actually kinda like.
But why, you might be wondering, is the fireplace plastered over? Well, because this fireplace was never intended to burn wood. Instead, a coal-burning stove would have set in front of the mantel to heat this part of the house. Its stovepipe would vent into a narrow chimney behind the wall. (A chimney that, incidentally, sticks out into the dining room behind it and is still the central vent for the HVAC in my house, a not particularly efficient system.)
Which leads me to this, commonly known as The Blister:
See that round blue thing in the middle of that exposed plaster? Try to overlook all the stuff that's found its way onto the mantel from other areas of the room after being knocked off a table by the cats. And the screwdriver. And the bottle of Bitter Yuck I've been spraying on the palm. Look higher. Yep, that big round thing up there. That was originally a stovepipe hole. At some point that hole was badly repaired, then wallpapered over, then painted over. It's very crumbly and ugly. My solution to that ugliness would be to knock out the patch and cover it up again with one of those pie-plate thingies. Mare, however, has a different idea...he thinks I should buy a coal-burning stove (an actual old one, not a replica) and run a stovepipe back into that hole. Not so the stove could actually be
used, because insurance agents tend to disapprove, but just for looks. I agree that a coal-burning stove in the front parlor would look really good, but I'm guessing a pie-plate thingy just might be cheaper and easier to install.
