Hi all,

We have been renovating our kitchen in an old miner's cottage. The kitchen has an old fireplace in it which we decided to include in our new kitchen. This means that we have put the oven and hotplates into the fireplace and ran the benchtop into it as well to make it look apart of the new kitchen. I was going to put some photos here but my camera is playing up. It is similar to the fireplace in the photo I have attached to this thread except our kitchen cupboards are white.

We have also put up a mantelpiece around the opening which looks very good and similar to the one in the photo but inside of the fireplace is not square like most are. We had to take alot of bricks out to make the opening high enough and the chimney gets more narrow inside the higher you go. We have therefore decided not to tile inside it and have rendered it which actually looks quite good. We want to paint the render white (matching our cupboards and mantel) but are unsure what sort of a paint to use. I know glossy oil paints are very easy to clean but don't think that oil paint would be a good idea around the gas hotplates. What sort of a paint do you think we should use for this area?

We were also thinking about putting a fan up the chimney but not sure if we really need to as smoke/steam seems to draw up there anyway. Is it necessary to have a fan when you have hotplates in a chimney? The only problem we have is that there are still little particles that fall down the chimney evernow and then even though it has been cleaned. This means you can't leave a pot without a lid on there, which is not ideal. Any ideas how to stop particles from falling without stopping the airflow?

Sorry for going on and on about this but it doesn't seem very common for people to build there fireplace into a new kitchen. Most people seem to knock them down but we think it looks very charming and suits our old house. So if there's any ideas out there or someone that has a fireplace/chimney in their kitchen then please let me know what you did.

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