<p>This is one of the widest groups of people with the largest span of expertise I know, so here goes.</p>
<p>We are repainting our bedroom, and replacing some furniture. Because of the shape of the room and the placement of the windows, the best place to put our bed is up against the fireplace, blocking it off (we rarely use the fireplace anyway) - is this safe? What happens if a bird or squirrel gets down the chimney, I think there is a screen, but I’m not sure? Would it make anyone feel weird, like you were sleeping in front of an open door?
We are going to put in some plywood to block off the hole, but it is so hot here that we aren’t too worried about being cold.
We’re not too worried about how it will look, we have a king size bed, and the mantel will sort of look like a shelf.</p>
<p>Yes, you can nominate me for strangest question of the year.</p>
<p>There should be a metal screen on top of the chimney to keep out critters, but having had an owl and two squirrels get into the fireplace at previous homes, clearly not all have them. It shouldn’t be too hard (or expensive to hire out, if you don’t like heights) to install one. There are also fp plugs made of thick black foam, available from catalogs such as Improvements, that block drafts from cracks in the fp damper. We recently placed them in our fireplaces. As far as I know, there are no safety concerns for your proposed bed placement, and the screen plus the plug will take care of the other possible problems.</p>
<p>We have squirrels galore and one has never gone down our chimney in 27 yrs. Of course, when they clean the chimney they look at me seriously, he must be 23, and says that we absolutely must have a screen on top of our chimney.A squirrel who climbed down a chimney could climb up a chimney.The real reason to have a screen on top of your chimney is to keep out an occasional bird. In 27 yrs we have had a leaf and bird or two make it down.</p>
<p>Squirrels can and do climb down chimneys. They have been know to completely trash homes. Every chimney should be capped with a screen, including any flues to the furnace.</p>
<p>I’d want to close it off somehow also. Most fireplaces have a damper in them to close off the flue in the off-season. This should keep most animals out. There should be a screen on the outside at the top of the chimney also.</p>
<p>You could make a wood box about the size of the fireplace opening and just place it there to block off the opening.</p>
<p>You could also drywall-in the fireplace. It’s relatively inexpensive and easy to do yourself.</p>
<p>Blocking it with plywood would probably also work.</p>
<p>I put shelves in the fireplace in my office, my problem is that on windy days old soot still comes down the chimney and the shelves need to be better sealed. (I hired some newby construction guys as a favor to a friend. They do great tile work, but not such great carpentry!) Anyway definitely get a screen for the top of your chimney. I’d say block it off at the top too, but you’re liable to forget about it and get the next owner of the house in trouble when they try to use the fireplace again.</p>
<p>We ended up with a wasp nest in our seldom used chimney - most unpleasant. I would get a chimney expert to figure out how to prevent things, large and small, from setting up house.</p>
<p>We had birds (some kind of swallows) nest in our chimney for 2 years in a row. They made all kinds of noise (there were babies in the nest). When they finally left we had a cap put on our chimney and have not had any more problems.</p>
<p>Thanks guys, I knew ya’ll would have some ideas.
We don’t want to do anything permanent to the fireplace because we will resell the house someday, and it doesn’t have to be pretty because the bed will hide whatever we put across the opening.</p>
<p>I have always really loved the layout of my house, but there are a couple of rooms that from the moment we moved in made you say, what were they thinking! We “fixed” the kitchen’s lame brain layout, but we’ve just sort of tolerated the bedroom.</p>
<p>I would suggest having the chimney cleaned before boarding it up. We finally had a mesh cap put on top of our chimney after several birds flew down and landed in the woodstove. And make sure your flue closes completely.</p>
<p>Our bed has been cattycornered for about the last 12 years. It’s free-floating right now, as we work on the painting, and I kind of like that, but it limits how much other furniture we can put in the room. Putting it in front of the fireplace will almost double the useable space in the room. It would fit in front of 2 of the windows, but if we put a nightstand on both sides we will have a tight walkway into the room on DH’s side, he doesn’t like that.
We talked about getting another bed, but decided that the divorce would be too expensive.</p>
<p>Chocoholic, probably not a single one that we haven’t giggled over! If we do sell the house in the future we will definitely rearrange the room, I don’t want strangers wandering through our house speculating on why the bed is in front of the fireplace, and exactly how that works out.</p>