We debated for some time about whether to have fireplaces that were capable of burning real wood.  I grew up with a wood burning fireplace, and have lived in and owned houses with them.  But we also rented a house that had a gas fireplace appliance in the master bedroom, where you could simply use a remote to turn it on and off, and that struck me as simply awesome.  But there was some concern that not having wood burning fireplaces might hurt resale value (way way down the road) a bit.  In the end, we decide that the simplicity of a gas appliance type was what we really wanted.  The units arrived last week, but we’ve been gone since then.  what a nice surprise to see them installed today.

We have three fireplaces in the house.  The largest one, which will be clad in stone to match the old fireplace in the back yard that will become the centerpiece of our pool house, is in the family room near the back of the house.

The beautiful stone chimney clad in Santa Barbara sand stone on the exterior is our living room fireplace.

Lastly, we have a fireplace in our master bedroom set off the floor so that it is nicely visible when in bed.

The little box to the top left of the fireplace box, connected to a pipe going down, and eventually up, is the fan system for the man cave in the basement.  To be able to smoke the occasional cigar down there, we added an exhaust fan system to it.  We actually hooked up the fan to power to assess how noisy it would be, to help us decide where to locate it.  It is pretty quiet, but since it is in the master bedroom, we are also going to insulate it well to make sure there is no noise, and it is mounted with rubber mounting blocks to make sure no vibrations travel through the structure.