I have a stone fireplace in my bedroom with a wood stove installed in it. I rarely use the wood stove because it is very hard to light. It doesn't add much to the ambience of the room because the window in the stove door is too small to see the fire and it makes the room too hot for comfortable sleeping. Worse, the fireplace is ugly. The stone work is lousy with great swaths of cement in between the stones. I'm trying to decide what to do. I've considered chipping enough stone away to be able to cover the stone with something simpler.l. Another possibility is to try to hammer out the stone altogether and make more space in the bedroom, but that may be more of a project than I should tackle without knowing the possible problems I could run into (not to mention the strenuous nature of the challenge!) I could return to a fireplace with no stove, or put in a different insert that would allow me to see the fire better. These thoughts come as part of a broader project, as I am in the process of whitewashing the pine paneling in the room, which will certainly influence design decisions I make for the fireplace. Any thoughts or advice (design or technical) would be appreciated! All of this comes with budget considerations, as I don't have much to spend on the project so would like to do as much of it myself as possible.