Making your home warm and cozy starts with the fireplace

I love this time of year, with the harvest rainbow of earth tones that appear on trees and greenery all over town.

Fall-inspired food always seems to hit the spot, warming our bellies with savory nibbles and hearty dishes. I also relish the cooler outdoor temperatures that signal a change in wardrobe from shorts and T-shirts to boots, flannels and puffy coats.

But my favorite fall event is that one pivotal evening when the weather outside is just a little too chilly to rely solely on our furnaces. That means we must put our neglected fireplaces to work after their summertime hiatus and enjoy the toasty embers.

The perfect fireplace

We all have a personal vision of a perfect fireplace. Perhaps it’s a fire pit in the backyard that you built with your children, brick by brick, and huddle around in the cool fall evenings, cozy in fuzzy wool blankets. A farmhouse-inspired fireplace, wrapped in shiplap with integrated cabinetry on either side with a reclaimed chunky and distressed mantel, is always a perfect look. What about something rustic, yet grand, like the beautiful and historic lobby fireplace, incorporating a hand-painted basket mural, at the Ahwahnee Hotel?

Or maybe your vision is something modern and sleek – a long, narrow rectangular glass gas insert that runs the length of your living room, with a single linear stream of blue gas delicately dancing over a bed of clear glass pebbles.

Dreamy fireplaces are hard to resist. Whether it’s enormous, walk-in style fireplaces or petite ones that accent a bedroom or bathroom wall, I think we’d all like to have a focal point that not only looks chic and stylish, but also provides a good amount of warmth and, of course, is easy to operate.

New life to an old fireplace

If you want to bring new life to a dated fireplace, consider a gas insert.

When you’re building a fireplace from scratch, typically this entails a fire box that is framed into a wall opening and finished with drywall, masonry and other decorative materials. An insert is anything that you “insert” into a fireplace box opening. They can be for natural gas, propane, electric EPA-certified wood, pellets and coal. For now, let’s focus on natural gas.

Let’s say your living room has a wood-burning fireplace and, luckily, a natural gas starter pipe to ignite the logs you place inside the fire box. There’s a pair of glass, bi-fold doors, framed in brass, and red brick surrounds just about everything. It’s a good sized fireplace, and you have plans to remove the brick and reface with white horizontal stone. And those 1980 brass doors also will be updated.

To start your remodel, a gas insert needs to be sized and fit to the opening. Your contractor will make the decision to keep the brick and place the new stone on top, or remove the brickwork. The existing gas will be connected to the new appliance, as will electricity.

And just like that, you have an updated fireplace.

Consult a contractor

This is a very short project rundown that you should discuss with your contractor before any brass is taken out to pasture. Updating a fireplace can be a somewhat straightforward design project that will not only provide you with a new aesthetic, but also a well-functioning heat source for those cold fall nights – and just in time for a toasty holiday season with your family.

Jennifer Leischer is the owner of J. Designs Interior Design based in Clayton. Contact her with questions, comments and suggestions at jenna@j-designs.com.