How to make cement board your b-i-t-*-h; or, Woodstove installation part 1

Yes, it's true - we finally have an installed woodstove.  I'm down to only one shirt and slippers with no socks. The house is warmer than it's been since July.  And it only took 2.5 years of thinking, planning, debating, and passionately yearning.  Of course, that's only since we moved into this house...the lack of a woodstove has been plaguing me since leaving for college nearly 11 (!!) years ago.  Once you have that instant heat gratification/mitten dryer/boot warmer in your life, it's hard to live without it.

We began the process of installing the interior portions of the chimney a few weeks ago when my handy dad came over and helped us out.  He is deathly afraid of heights, though, so we actually paid a guy to do the roof part.  That's Jimmy "I Ain't Afraid Of No Heights" Westleigh and his helper up high. 

Once he took care of business up there, it was up to us to attach the stove in the living room.  We decided to use double-walled stove pipe, which allows us to reduce the pipe's required clearance from the wall from 18" to 6".  Every inch counts in our small rooms.  Modern stoves come with fancy things like built-in heat shields and little plaques that tell you exactly how close you can put it to the wall without it (the wall) bursting into flames. But because we enjoy complicating our lives, we instead chose to install an older "unlisted" (i.e., built before anyone ever dreamed up the EPA), stove, which we purchased in immaculate condition for $25 at the same auction where we got all our maple sugaring equipment.  But the stove falls squarely in the category of They Just Don't Make 'Em Like They Used To, and you know how we feel about old stuff.

In order to reduce the recommended clearance of an unlisted stove from 36" (which would basically be the middle of the room) to greater than or equal to 12", we needed to install wall protection.  It's a little more complicated that just covering a wall with brick or tiles. In that case, if your stove is too close to the wall, you may just end up conducting heat directly to the wall. (Bad.)  The key thing is to install a non-combustible shield with at least a 1" airspace between it and the wall, with a gap near the floor and at top to allow the heat to rise up and out. Air is the best insulator, but only if it can move around.  If you cover those gaps, it's stagnant and doesn't help you much at all.

I had a hard time with this initially, believing there would be no way to do this without it looking ridiculous.  Then, I read through a bunch of message boards on hearth.com that were basically full of men saying "my wife thinks this kind of installation will look bad" and other people reassuring them that there are at least infinity ways to avoid having it look bad.  So I got over it.  Also, we agreed that because we're not sure how this old stove is going to perform - it could guzzle the wood, its insides could disintegrate after being used for the first time in probably 60 years, it might just be too huge - that we'd do a temporary hearth installation.  Also, we're slightly impatient and lazy, not to mention cold, because it's already January in Maine and we've had four straight months of intense house renovations and we're ready for a time out.  Planning and tiling a hearth right now would probably send me off the deep end, but I NEED THE HEAT.

So here we go.

Following instructions found here and a clearance reduction chart found here, we purchased three 3'x5' sheets of 1/2" thick HardieBacker cement board.  In order to achieve the necessary 1" clearance from the wall, you need long screws and some non-combustible spacers.  Apparently you can buy ceramic thingies designed for this purpose - or you can just get 1" copper pipe couplings for about 40 cents apiece in the plumbing section.  We went with that.  You also don't want to install the screws directly behind the stove, or they will just conduct heat through your non-combustibles directly into your wall.  So we pre-drilled the screws so that a little more than an inch stuck through around the perimeter of the board, propped the cement board up on a couple of boards to keep the proper clearance from the floor, and carefully positioned the copper couplings on the screws. It sounds so easy when you sum it up in one sentence.

Then we gently scootched it all towards the wall, being careful not to let the couplings fall, leveled it, and sent it home. Because we didn't cover it with anything, we could unscrew our temporary installation anytime.  We could tile directly on this cement board if we wanted to, though, as long as we leave our vents on the top and bottom.

On to the floor...we had some beautiful slate tiles that we bought at the Portland Habitat ReStore, plus some slate that was leftover from my mother's floor project.  We did some annoying, time consuming measuring to get decent clearances around the perimeter of the stove, plus get it so we didn't have to cut too many tiles.  We laid down another full sheet of cement board, but that wasn't big enough.  We needed to cut more strips to position around the large sheet.  As many DIYers will attest to, cement board is a b-i-*-c-h to cut.  Manufacturers say you can score and snap it like drywall, but civilians will say that process is a mess at best, impossible at worst.  There are, of course, lots of expensive cutting tools (that we don't have) to remedy this problem.  We were growing frustrated (and still cold) when Gabe had a stroke of genius not mentioned on any DIY message board I found. So, Interwebbers, allow me to enlighten you as to how to make cement board YOUR b-i-t-*-h.

Chances are, if you're using cement board, you're going to be doing some tiling on top of it, right?  Right.  So that means you're going to need tiling-type tools, including (ready for this?)...a wet tile saw.

Designed to cut ceramic, porcelain, natural stone, etc., the wet tile saw also works great for cutting cement board.  We have a Depot cheapo Husky wet tile saw, a purchase we haven't regretted for a second, and will pay for itself many times over by not having to rent one for upcoming bathroom and kitchen projects. Lots of DIY tutorials will tell you to get a special table saw blade or grinder or something, but those will create lots of bad-for-you dust.  Not so with the wet tile saw.

A few small tile cuts later, we just positioned the cement board on the floor and set the tiles loose on top of it. Voila, a hearth!  Again, this is temporary, but we can use all these materials in a more permanent installation later if we so choose.

This is already a long post, so stay tuned and I'll show you our totally excellent new/old stove!