S Burkey wrote:
Chris Bacon wrote in message ...
S Burkey wrote:
Currently redesigning the basement kitchen in a victorian terrace (4
floors) and decided to open up the inglenook primarily to deal with
some damp problems in the kitchen as a whole.
Had the chimney sweep come last week and now we're trying to figure
out how to clean the brickwork at the back of the inglenook.

An inglenook in a Victorian terrace? Can you describe it in a bit more
detail? Are the bricks soft, or hard? What about the mortar, has it
been re-done? What are you doing with it a=fter it's "cleaned"?


Well the sweep called it an inglenook but to me its just a blooming
great big hole! Hmmm well its about 4ft wide by about 5ft high - I
can walk into it anyway without ducking, and maybe 1.5 - 2 ft deep.
Seems to be hard bricks but as I'm currently sorting out the wiring
for the house in general so haven't studied it in general.

At least one house in the street has an aga in that space - we're not
entirely sure what we're going to do with it to be honest at the
moment.

Hm, you're probably best scrubbing it off as best you can and using
paint or plaster, unless there's a chemical method of cleaning the
bricks. To get the brick surface up to a temperature at which the
soot will burn off will essentially mean re-firing them, which you
won't be able to do. They'd need to be very hot indeed, which is
likely to damage them. Consider sand-blasting, try glass-paper or
similar, if you really want to, but I think you'll end up (unless
you sand-blast, maybe even then) with a very patchy and unsightly
finish. If you sit an AGA or similar in the hole it might look very
good. I've got a solid-fuel Rayburn in my kitchen, and I've tiled
out the hole it is in with 8x6" tiles. Gas would be better than
solid, but noisy, and new ranges are expensive! Solid fuel does
have something about it, though. Try e-bay for luck.