Yet again I am sucking more info out of CBN than I am giving back.

Since I discovered we have real wood floors in our family room See hardwood floors: Plan B , Our wood stove installation schedule has been bumped up.

Currently we have a gas insert fireplace installed in the corner of our family room Bottom left corner in this floor plan. We'd like to replace it with a wood stove (first choice) or a real fireplace (if the wood stove is going to take up too much floor space).

We don't have a chimmney in the house, so my plan is to go out the wall & up the side of the house with an insulated chimney. I know that heating wise it would be better to have the stove closer to the middle of the house. Can I do a horizontal run of chimney thru my gargage & then out & up the side of the house?

Being a Mechanical Engineer, I can do the heat calcs to size the stove. Being lazy I'd rather look at some rules of thumb on the internet. Any good web sites?

I'm going to visit a couple of stove dealers on friday. Any questions I should be asking?

Any good picture books of hearths? Need some Ideas to decide what we want.

How much of this is a DIY project. What is best left to the pros? Sometimes I can be too optomistic about my abilities [img]/forums/images/icons/blush.gif[/img]