When our house was built in 1896, homeowners relied on its fireplaces to heat the home. Most of our eight (Yes, EIGHT!) coal fireplaces have 3 components: the surround, a coal grate and a cover door. The surround serves as the frame for the fireplace opening, most of ours allow for a coal grate to attach to the inside of the fireplace. The third component is the cover door (often times referred to as a summer cover), which is also mounted to the surround frame, but attaches from the outside. During the hot, humid Georgia summers when the fireplaces weren’t in use, they would cover the opening with these cast iron or metal covers. Today, the covers are often left in place year-round on nonworking or sealed fireplaces, preventing cooled or warmed air from escaping up the chimney (and to help avoid flying critters from entering the home).
Each surround and cover are made differently and styles and sizes vary by manufacturing companies, preventing houses of having a generic size for the covers. Today, a good deal of old homes are missing the ornate, removable covers. During World War II, a lot of homeowners donated (willingly or forced) scrap metal and iron to the government to be use for the war effort—many summer covers were donated.
A great deal of restoration stores sell summer covers and other salvaged items from historic homes and businesses. Due to the rich history in Georgia, there are a lot of late 19th century and early 20th century homes in our area, providing a vast inventory to search through. If you are in the market, be sure to take careful measurements and check local antique or restoration stores.
We are lucky enough that our house has all seven summer covers, made from a variety of materials (the eighth fireplace is a different design from the others… we’ll get to that in another post). Three of the downstairs fireplace covers are made of heavy, cast iron doors and the upstairs covers are made of metal and cast iron. Almost all of the covers are ornate and match the design elements on the frame. Unfortunately, most of ours have been covered in layers of paint. The covers themselves will be easy to clean due to the fact that they can be removed and cleaned outside of the house, but the surrounds are a different story. Since these are built into the actual house, they’ll need to be restored in place.
Recently, we took one of the covers home to test a few methods. I used some of the leftover stripping product to see if that would budge the paint.
As I was scraping the solution from the cover, I decided to leave some of the paint in the nooks and crannies of the iron instead of getting it completely clean. Let me know what you think:
This will be an ongoing project…. stay tuned!