since we are thinking about moving house soon, we thought we better do all the stuff that we said we would do two years ago, like ripping the hideous fire place out...

the construction of the fireplace is like every other legacy the last owners left for us, totally hamfisted. a frame of bricks has been constucted and concrete poured into the middle section. they obviously thought their ideas so brilliant that nobody would ever want to replace them!

oh yeah, and they inserted a plastic pipe into the middle of it (it ran from one side to the other with an opening at each end), maybe for a gerbil to run through?