Hey, I like this.

Whewww!  First off, let me say that building this little hearth was definitely more of a challenge than I anticipated.  I attribute this to a couple things:

a) Our little old house is 106 years old.  In its life, it has seen many a remodel, addition, etc… not neccessarily by qualified individuals.  This makes for non exisitant right angles and occasionally sloping floors

b) This was our first time dealing with cement backer board and tiling.  With the things we learned, I think we could build this again 3x as quickly.  So, as you’re reading this, don’t judge our rookie construction too harshly and by no means am I telling you the 100% correct way to do things!

Here is the corner of our house pre-hearth:

We removed the baseboard heater, as we won’t be needing that anymore!  We patched the holes in the wall and repainted the wall below the window.  That area looked so much better as soon as we removed the heater. 

Before starting the hearth, we removed the small quarter-inch round trim so the hearth would sit up against the wall.  We decided to leave the 4″ trim since it was taller than our platform. 

As I have alluded to previously, I am a huge dork.  I took my work computer home and used SolidWorks to build the layers of our hearth in 3D.  This was really helpful to determine the appropriate heights of the platform relative to the tile, along with taking measurements for tile cuts.  Of course, you will be fine making your hearth without this.  Just be sure to measure carefully

The frame we constructed consisted of 1×4′s (Around the edge and about 18″ apart inside), plywood and 0.42″ cement backer board.  In order to get the height we needed to accomodate the 2″ mosaic tile on the sides, we used two layers of 7/16″ plywood, rather than the standard 1 1/8″ thick plywood.  This took a lot of playing around to figure out the right combination of ingredients to give us the sandwich height we wanted.  We didn’t anticipate all the shimming we needed to do to make it level, so parts of it were a little taller than anticipated.  Of course, Juno helped out a lot with this. 

Cutting the cement board to attach to our wood frame was another challenge we had.  In watching Youtube videos and googling “How-To’s,” everyone said “Oh yes, cutting the backer board is easy. Just score it and snap it.  Ta da!”

LIES.  Scoring it was a pain in the butt and less than accurate.  If you do choose this method, I would subtract between 1/8″-1/4″ of your length to account for the rough edge the scoring creates.  Online, they discourage you from using a saw due to the toughness of the cement board, unless you have a special blade.  After hours of struggling with scoring,  we finally said “screw it!” and went right for the jigsaw.  Ok, sure- it may dull the blade, but it would have saved us hours if we had done this in the first place.  So our advice?  Just use an old Jigsaw blade and toss it when you’re done.   We finally got the cement board mounted (with Thinset between it and the plywood) and fastened with the special cement screws.  Once this is done, apply the Fiberglass Mesh Tape to all of the seams and adhere with more thinset.  This creates a smooth and strong transition between boards for tiling. 

Now it gets a lot more fun

Our neighbors let us borrow their wet saw for tile cutting, which helped a ton!  We only needed a few cuts, and that part went very smoothly.  We made our cuts and layed out the tile with spacing to make sure everything would fit the way we wanted. 

Once we were happy with the layout, we used the 1/4″ trowel and set the tile. 

After letting the thinset dry for 24 hours, we grounted the tile.  After another 24 hours, we added the caulk where the hearth meets the wall and floor.  We opted for the matching sanded grout and I am so happy we did!  Look at a close-up, you can’t even tell they are different materials:

CHA DA! The final product:  We will be adding a little white cover to where the electrical was for the baseboard and re-painting the trim once we repair it. 

 

 

Stay tuned for the exciting part of the hearth- THE PELLET STOVE!  

Post a comment

Name: (required)

Email Address: (will not be published) (required)

URL:

Comments: