Those Little Finishing Touches.

The first picture shows the hole left in a wall after an old balanced flue boiler has been removed and replaced by a modern fanned flue boiler. To anyone not in the trade a balanced flue was a rather large, unsightly metal box usually around 12" square or more. We've fitted a new boiler with a fanned flue, now popping out of the middle of the hole and bricked up the inner leaf using thermalite block.

There's been some interesting {well to me anyway} correspondence and pictures in the 'Gas Safe' trade magazine about the unsightly way such flue holes are often made good. Perhaps 'made bad' would be a better term as everyday I see some shockers when just simply driving around. Many don't even get patched up at all!

To me it's all about having pride in your work. We cut out any half bricks and clean away any old mortar. It's then simply a matter of sourcing a few matching face bricks to complete matters as shown in the second picture.

These bricks are 73mm pre war commons and it cost a couple of quid from our local builders merchants for eight of them to match in, leaving a nice finish. The whole task took about an hour.