Kansas City Stone Fireplace

Brick and stone fireplaces, in Kansas City, are one of the oldest and most classic luxury items for residential properties. They make for beautiful decorative focal points in living rooms and bedrooms. They can provide supplemental home heating for the bitter KC winters, and in some cases, they can even give you an extra cooking option for your family. Recently, we've helped homeowners from Shawnee to Prairie Village, from Overland Park to Grandview, and throughout the greater Kansas City area with all their fireplace installation and cleaning needs. Here are some more specific things to consider as you move forward with your fireplace projects.

Outdoor Stone Fireplaces in Kansas City, MO
If you've always wanted a fireplace in your home, but don't have any reasonable place to put it, the answer might be to take a page out of the Kansas City cuisine. Outdoor stone fireplaces make superb fire pits for all your BBQing needs. They can also extend the calendar year of your deck and general backyard enjoyment. Bonfire parties are among the greatest crowd-pleasers regardless of age. If you really want to do it up right, you might think about installing an outdoor kitchen down the road and designing an outdoor stone fireplace as the current centerpiece for your future plans.

Kansas City Stone Fireplace Costs
One of the great things about fireplaces is that there is an option out there for anybody, regardless of budget. If you can't afford a real stone masonry fireplace, you can look at prefabricated fireplaces. These units themselves are available in a wide range of sizes and designs that can cost as little as a few hundred dollars or a couple thousand. For the real thing, however, you're probably looking at three thousand dollars minimum, ranging all the way up to $10,000 or more. Of course, if you need to in some way alter the walls of your home to accommodate the fireplace, the total costs can become astronomical. You may want to avoid getting locked in too fast to one idea. Talk to contractors and see what's out there. Matching your needs and your budget can be more difficult than you think. The cheapest avenue is rarely the best and, yet, for every dollar you spend on your fireplace is a dollar you won't be able to invest in other areas of your home.

Stone Fireplaces and the Kansas City Fire Department
Here are the safety guidelines for fireplace operation as listed on the Kansas City Fire Department website:

• Fireplaces regularly build up creosote in their chimneys. They need to be cleaned out frequently and chimneys should be inspected for obstructions and cracks to prevent deadly chimney and roof fires.
  
• Check to make sure the damper is open before starting any fire.
  
• Never burn trash, paper, or green wood in your fireplace. These materials cause heavy creosote build-up and are difficult to control.
  
• Use a screen heavy enough to stop rolling logs and big enough to cover the entire opening of the fireplace to catch flying sparks.
  
• Don't wear loose-fitting clothes near any open flame.
  
• Make sure the fire is completely out before leaving the house or going to bed.
  
• Store cooled ashes in a tightly sealed metal container outside the home.

Kansas City Stone Fireplace Maintenance and Contractors
These common sense guidelines are important to remember, but even proper daily operation doesn't alleviate the need to have your fireplace cleaned regularly, every year or every other year, depending on your level of use. Chimney cleaning removes the creosote that builds up over time. If enough creosote builds up, it can ignite creating a chimney fire that will burn hot enough to cause the entire chimney to explode. Whether you need a chimney sweep, a fireplace installer, or a masonry contractor to build a custom stone fireplace in Kansas City, ServiceMagic can help. Each and every contractor in our system is put through a rigorous ten-step screening process. Moreover, our database of customer ratings and reviews will allow you to see what other homeowners have thought about the contractors who contact you with estimates.

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