Opening up kitchen chimney

[Manda]

The chimney mantle in our kitchen is quite low (at 1460 mm). There is a side by side benchtop stove underneath which needs replacing ASAP as the state of it renders the area useless. The flue of the chimney is REVOLTING due to years of neglect and I think a couple of fires....(black, greasy, grimey "chunks" of grot). The height of the mantle makes cooking quite painful on the neck and back, the flue just makes it v. unpleasant.

Background - house is 50's weatherboard clad in aluminium.

Can anyone give opinion on whether it would be worthwhile having a builder/brickie come in to open up the front of the chimney ? As we want to put in a new gas stove and rangehood. Will do a complete kitchen reno at a later stage. For now the cabinets etc are all ok.

Bearing in mind - The house will need restumping within the next 5 years. (We cannot afford to have done for a couple of years at least as first home owners on a budget). We do not intend to raise the level of the house either.

thanks

[Iain]

We had a similar problem and we ditched the whole idea, redesigned the kitchen and the alcove is now a pantry.
I have bought the Hettich 60kg drawer slides and soon (?) it will be a roll out pantry.
This maintains the character of the old kitchen with the brickwork and makes it useful too.
We had an old (1860's) house in Beechworth with a similar problem and the stove was in the alcove and I kept banging my head on the bricks when I was cooking, all sort of bit fell out of the chimney into the pots, sticky wet stuff which I suspect was grease turning back to liquid and dropping back, possum poo, dead flies and anything else that could manage to get up out of arms reach.
We solved this one one by selling it to some Sydney yuppies who thought the place had 'character'.

[julaher]

Manda
Do you need to keep the chimney, is it supporting other parts of the house. I had the same experience in my previous home which was a two storey spanish mission style cal bung in country vic. Took the whole chimney out (which was situated between the kitchen and laundry), it gave me heaps more room in the kitchen, which was eventually renovated and no more banging my head on the mantel and not being able to fit more than two pots on the stove! Removing the chimney didn't take away any character fromt the house either, you can also use the old bricks for paving in the garden.