We finally had our wood heater installed the other day.  To my frustration, we still couldn’t use it because we needed a hearth first. When we went to the heater shops, there were pre-made hearths there that you could buy but they were fugly and expensive (from memory, about $320).  So we decided to make our own hearth …

To make the hearth, we purchased a piece of cement sheeting, 14mm thick, 1 metre long and 1.2 metres wide.  This cost about $27. We set the cement sheeting down on the floor where the heater was to be installed (according to what the sales people in the heater shops told us, the hearth can be placed directly on top of the carpet, so that’s what we did). Then we placed the heater on top of the cement sheet (no mean feat when you consider that the heater weights 150kg). We positioned the heater on the cement sheeting right where we wanted it to be installed and traced around the base of the heater onto the cement sheeting. 

Then we laid out our tiles onto the cement sheeting to see how they would fit best and made a plan of where each sheet of tiles would sit. We didn’t actually start putting the tile adhesive on just yet because we wanted the heater installer to approve the position of the heater when he came the following day, in case we had to move the heater for some reason (the last thing we wanted was to tile the hearth and then have to smash it up and start again).  [Photo taken at night, sorry :( ]

About the tiles we used: We bought the tiles from Bunnings. They’re about $4.50 a sheet and you get 12 tiles on there, a 3 x 3 sheet.  You can find them in the outdoors section, they’re called crazy tiles.  While you’re at Bunnings looking for your crazy tiles, you also need to purchase a small tub of tile adhesive and a couple of bags of grout (we used coloured grout to match the tiles).

[Photo taken at night, sorry :(]

So we laid the tiles out to see how they would fit in and then when we were happy with the positioning of the tiles and the spacing etcetera, we traced around the outline of the tiles. We then made a note of where the tiles had been placed and removed the tiles off the cement sheeting and put them to the side. Next, we removed the cement sheeting off the floor, took the sheet outside and using a tree branch saw, we cut along the line that we just traced to cut off the excess cement sheeting.  We ended up with a piece of cement sheeting measuring approximately 1.1 metres x 1.1 metres.  Then we took it back insde, placed it on the floor in the correct position and lifted the 150kg heater back onto the cement sheeting.

The following morning, the wood heater installer came and said that it was find to be installed where we had positined it, then he connected all the bits of the flue to the heater through the ceiling and out to the roof (see the flue is now connected to the top of the heater in the below photo?).

So now that the heater was propery connected up, we could go ahead and stick our tiles to the cement sheeting. We laid the tiles back onto the sheeting in the set up that we had planned out the night before then we got our tub of adhesive and a paint scraper (used in the wallpaper removal project) and buttered the tiles with the adhesive.  We then waited 24 hours for the adhesive to cure.

The photo below shows a close up of the tiles with the adhesive clearly visible on the back of them.

Here’s a closer photo of the tiles around the side of the heater.  (And this photo really shows the colour of the heater well – the colour is “champagne brown”.)

After waiting the specified 24 hours for the adhesive to set, we then started on the grouting. Here’s the grout that we used (we used two of these bags):

Then we mixed the grout with water in this bucket (the grout turns almost black when you add water):

Then I realised that if we were going to just whack grout onto the tiles, it wasn’t going to be very neat.  So I realised that we needed some kind of piping bag to spoon the grout into so that the grout can be put into the crevices neatly and easily.  So I went down to the local supermarket and bought this $3 squeezie sauce bottle. It worked a treat. 

So we spooned the slodgy grout into the squeezie sauce bottle and squeezed the grout out into the crevices.

Then we went along and smoothed down the grout with our fingers.

Sometimes grout got onto the actual tiles, so we went around with a wet rag and made sure that we wiped off all the grout off the tiles before it started to go hard. I thn it’s important to do this on these kind of tiles – because they’re not shiny glazd tiles it would be super hard trying to remove the grout from these tiles when the grout had set. That’s me wiping off the grout from the top of the tiles with a wet rag.

When we finished, the hearth looked like this (all wet and damp):

Because the grout is so thick, it takes about 3 days for it to dry completely.

Although we are now using the fire, the hearth is still not completely finished as I think it needs some wooden beading runnin around the 3 edges to make it look ‘finished’. Stay tuned for how to make a frame for a diy hearth :)

We now have a log pile in our backyard.

Oh and here’s the fire in actin [Sorry, photo taken at night :( ]