Removing a fireplace?

[Steven Torrez]

Hello BP,

I am looking at houses in Salem Oregon and all the houses in my price range have a fireplace. These are smaller 2 or 3 bedroom houses, so the fireplace takes up a huge chunk of area in the living room and makes it virtually impossible to use my entertainment center. I believe taking it out would dramatically increase the value of the home, or at least make it easier to sell/more attractive. Most of these homes were built in the 70's and the fireplace dates it.

So my question is, How hard would it be to remove a fireplace? Could the bricks in the room be removed and that area walled over? Or would I need to completely gut the whole thing chimney and all? About half of them are not on an exterior wall. And finally, I know the roof would need to be redone in that spot as well.

Thanks, Steve

[Steven Torrez]

@Kevin Phu

I ended up buying a house with a fireplace and actually removed it last week. 

So the first piece of advice would be to rent a dumpster or dump trailer before you start the job. 

I didn't and now I have to move all the brick twice. 

Start with the chimney and work your way down. You don't want the weight of the chimney to collapse the roof when you take the main part out of the room. 

I thankfully was replacing the carpet so I didn't have to worry about the floor. It would have made the job 10x harder if I wanted to keep the existing flooring. Especially hardwood. I recommend getting a wheelbarrow to haul loads outside. I didn't have one for the first half of the day and it was much harder. 

If took me a full day to remove all the brick down to the pad in the crawlspace. 

Once removed you'll need to replace the plywood and shingles on your roof, drywall the hole in the ceiling, build up new subfloor, and finally patch the flooring you have currently. 

It took me a day to remove it, a morning to do the floor, a morning to patch the roof and the ceiling will only take a few hours to get the drywall up. 

Then comes the job of matching the texture. 

I was removing the popcorn ceiling throughout the house so matching texture wasn't an issue. 

I will attach pictures when I figure out how to attach them using my phone.