We wanted supplemental heat for our living room.  It's an old farm house and a cold north wind can cause the back porch to be pretty warm and the living room to be prettty cold.  Also we wanted a secondary heat source in case of an extended power outage.

I found a free standing gas fireplace.  At a local lumber yard found a stove board made to look like stone.  We wanted to keep kids away from it, and we found two sections of decorative fence that just happened to match the board!  There is an eye bolt screwed in the wall we drop a cut off post in, and the two sections meet at the corn where a post joins them.  When the grandkids get bigger we can pull three pipes and remove the fence.

I don't like non-vented heaters, spent too many years driving a gas truck to like them.  But it does the job and was a lot easier and least costly to install than anything else we considered. Plus with our room arrangement there was no easy way to do anything else.  And if we no longer want it I can have it all gone in half an hour.

(gas fireplace.JPG)

gas fireplace.JPG (49KB - 101 downloads)