Sacred Fires
The wintergarden section is quite cold since it is actually open to the outside via the roof mostly which is not of the insulated type, but breathes to the outside, it is merely tiled up so that no rain gets in, and there are large gaps between the glass that the old owner had installed. This inspired me to build a DIY fireplace, so that we could use it as a baking oven & also eventually to heat up the space on colder nights slightly, since we also intended to add some raised beds indoors so that we might cultivate flowers & vegetables year round. So we collected a bunch of bricks that were laying scattered around the property & I used clay from the garden as mortar to seal it up. It could use some improvements still, like perhaps a door to shut it closed, but the whole construction actually worked quite well to my surprise, some of the mortar cracked in the first use which we had to patch up again, but considering that it was built for free, that is no big deal, since I could easily dismantle the whole thing if we needed to & redo it.
Here I am adding clay to the inside after laying the bricks with clay into its initial structure
Getting in there and slapping the clay against all of the interior surfaces to seal it up
Once it was finished I added a layer of white paint on the upper portion, not a perfect job, had some spray paint left over so this was just for fun & using up what was left in that
While I was doing the Fireplace, @kaliphae painted the outside of the Wintergarden section in Black in the hopes of capturing some more of the heat from the sunlight so that it may radiate that extra heat into the room, since those portions are made of metal it should be able to radiate some extra warmth into that space. Our plan is to build the raised beds near to the windows, so while it might not heat up the room itself much, it should make for a few degrees of difference near to the frames where the plants will be.
I also made a short video of the fireplace in action, which was the first test to check if it would work, you can more clearly see how it was constructed and get a better look at the paint job that KPHI did for the window frames outside.
