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The Giant Stone Fireplace – Episode 13 of Building a Farmhouse

I am really excited about today’s post. We actually get to talk about the inside of the house, more specifically the fireplace.

The process for the fireplace started early on in the build, but then it took a halt until the drywall went up so it took several months to get it to this point.

I knew I wanted stone when going into this design. I love stone cottage fireplaces that you often find in England and I knew I wanted that look for my home. This is the living space that is going to greet all of our family and friends when they come and visit.

My vision was for it to be inviting, but also make a statement. I wanted it to look old, but fresh and be completely functional.

If you have missed any of the previous posts about our build, you can catch up on them in our Building a Farmhouse series.

The wall that holds the fireplace is right in front of the stairs that go up to the second floor. Right behind it is a closet. Part of the wall (to the left) is open for the stairway and to the right there is space for a built-in.

My husband wants to have a real wood stove go inside of the hearth so we opted to make the entire structure out of cinder block to keep everything nice and safe. While this is probably overkill, it makes us sleep better at night knowing that the walls are protected from high heat.

Once drywall went up, the guys started working on the stone. The added mortar over the entire thing first.

We purchased manufactured stone and it took about 4 weeks to produce. I picked a light color scheme and a large size style for the individual stacked stone. I am not a fan of thin small stone pieces.

They started working on the bottom of the fireplace and worked their way up. The pattern was of course random, and they left a nice sized gap in between each of the stone pieces.

Nelson and I put a temporary 2 x 6 in place for the mantle. Eventually we plan on putting a nice piece of solid wood or build a faux mantel like we did in our last house. For now, we kept that as placeholder so they could lay the stone around it and leave the space for us to work on the mantel when we could get to it at a later time.

The hearth portion also got the same stone and everything was set to dry for the day.

The mortar to fill in the gaps was initially supposed to be white, however, it took on the color of the sand we were using so it turned a little beige on us. Either way, it still worked out and looked really good. Adding that mortar really brightened up the fireplace even more. It’s amazing how different it looks without it.

Here is the fireplace as of right now. That little wood stove is what we will be putting inside of it for now. Yes, it’s small, but since we have it on hand we figured we would use it, until we find the one we really want down the road.

These wood stoves can be pretty pricey so we are just going to save up until we can get a new one eventually.

And since I just couldn’t help myself, I took an image of the area and asked ChatGPT to give me some ideas on how it would look finished and styled. We will be adding built-in bookshelves on the right so I made sure to ask for that when I created the mock-ups.

And then I played with the color schemes. I asked for a more neutral color scheme…

A coastal theme…

And finally a Christmas theme…

And frankly, this just gets me even more excited to be done with the house. There is so much potential in this space, I cannot wait to start bringing in our furniture and start decorating it.

The process of the stone being added to the fireplace was so satisfying and you can watch it below.