This is one of my favorite spaces in our home. This is our family room that is open to our kitchen and at the other end of the house from our main living room / dining room area. There use to be an old fireplace in this room. I had no desire to maintain the old fireplace, deal with dirty wood being brought in all the time, or the nuisance of ‘making a fire’ so when we renovated the room, we tore it back to the fire box and capped and sealed it.
What about heating you ask? Let’s face it most real wood burning fireplaces actually suck the heat out of your house. And I wasn’t concerned about it being a heat source as we have a heat pump on this floor (a mini split one all three floors). It’s at the other end of the house but it’s strategically located to blow straight down both sides of the main floor. The one on this floor is our most powerful one at 18,000 BTU and it works like magic even at this end of the house. This end is maybe one to two degrees less than our main living room/dining room space where the heat pump is located.
Since heat wasn’t an important factor (thanks to our heat pumps), we tore down the ugly old fireplace and created our faux fireplace in its place. Yes, we thought about installing an electric fireplace but I figured we didn’t need it as a heat source so why spend the money on one? And honestly, I liked this look better! I wanted it to feel somewhat authentic though so I insisted that we would keep some of the dust and charred wood bits on the bottom. So truth be told – the bottom of the firebox never gets cleaned. And we joke and say our ‘fireplace channel’ is the lake out the window that is always moving (except when it freezes over). We’d never consider living without heat pumps now. We love the even, economical heating during the colder times and let’s not forget the air conditioning setting for the summer – BONUS!
To learn more about heat pumps and NS Power’s heat pump financing program click here.
