Q: I’d like to remove my fireplace brick, but it goes all the way up from the hearth to the ceiling. Is it possible to remove the brick and replace it with another material? After removal, what type of material should I use to cover things up? Is there something that I can use that will still allow me to use the fireplace?

A: Yes, you can remove the brick facade and replace it with another material. And you will still be able to use the fireplace. The only restriction is that the material around the firebox must be noncombustible. Common choices are marble, some other type of stone or tile.

Check your local building code to determine how far the hearth must extend in front of the firebox and the area on the sides and top of the opening that require noncombustible material. Expect 8 to 12 inches on the top and sides and a minimum of 18 inches for the hearth. When it comes to the hearth, the deeper, the better. There’s nothing worse than a hot ember that burns a hole in the carpet. The remainder of the wall can be any material you want, from drywall to plaster to the rustic appearance of wood.

The removal process is fairly labor intensive, but if you do the demolition yourself you’ll save a bunch of money. Furthermore, if you do the whole job yourself, all you’ll be out is the cost of materials. Go slowly, be careful and you’ll be fine. When you’re done you’ll have a spiffy new look for pennies on the dollar.

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You will need a hammer and a cold chisel. If you want to make quicker work of it, rent a small electric demolition hammer.

Make sure to remove any breakable objects from the area and cover the floor. Dropping a brick from 8 or 9 feet in the air is not a good idea. Have a helper handy to receive and stack the bricks when you remove them.

To remove the old brick, start at the top and work down. Begin by chiseling the mortar on the top line of brick. It might be a little tough to remove the first brick, but once you pry it out, the others should follow more easily. Remove one brick at a time. Work down the wall until all of the face bricks, including any mantel you might have, are removed. Then remove the bricks from the hearth.

With the wall and the firebox opening stripped, you’re ready to reface.

It’s vital to have a flat, solid surface on which to affix the new stone, tile or marble. For larger, flat pieces of tile or marble, you can either plaster a mortar bed over the existing brick to create a substrate or you can affix cement board such as Durock with thinset mortar. Use concrete nails to hold the cement board in place. When the mortar dries, you’ll have a solid, flat surface.

If you use smaller, irregular material, such as individual stones, you can forgo the cement board. Just apply a thick layer of mortar and embed the new material. In both cases you will have to pretreat the old brick with a concrete adhesive to allow the new mortar to stick to the old brick.

A word of caution: If you decide to use material that is very heavy, make sure the floor framing will support the weight. You might have to go into the crawlspace to install a couple of concrete piers with a beam across the floor joists to support the added load. Also, if you decide on stone or another type of brick, you’ll need a steel bar across the top span of the firebox to support that weight.

Two final suggestions: This is a good time to have your fireplace inspected by a licensed, bonded chimney sweep. Also, it’s likely that your project will require a building permit. Make sure you get one.

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Rendering of the front of the new Open Door health center in Arcata | Image from Open Door Community Health

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Arcata’s new Open Door Community Health Center — the big old building under construction on the corner of Foster and Sunset — is almost complete and, if all goes according to plan, should open its doors to patients this fall.

Open Door announced in the summer of 2019 plans for the project to open by 2022. But when COVID 2020 struck, the project had to be postponed. The crew eventually broke ground in 2021, and Cheyenne Spetzler, Open Door’s senior vice president of development, told Outpost that development has stayed pretty much on schedule since then.

“I just have to say that Pacific Builders, these people are my heroes,” Spetzler said in a telephone interview on Monday afternoon. “Because any time there’s a problem, they just find a way to keep moving.”

At this point, almost all of the most time-consuming infrastructure—the plumbing, electrical, and heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC)—was installed, and the sheetrock was brought in as well. Spetzler said that one of the main delays in construction was the installation of the windows due to supply chain issues. The crews are still waiting for the windows, which will be delivered around four months late. But Spetzler said that despite the delay, the project’s schedule was not greatly impacted.

The only potential delay that worries Spetzler slightly concerns licensing by the California Department of Health and Human Services. Once the building is complete and passes inspection, Open Door has to turn in its license package, and it sometimes takes months for the state to process it. If everything goes smoothly, Spetzler assumes that the facility will open its doors in October.

To operate the new clinic, operations from the two existing Open Door centers in Arcata – Humboldt Open Door on 10th Street and NorthCountry Clinic on 18th Street – will be transferred to the new facility and the other two locations will be closed. Spetzler said that merging the two clinics will make things more streamlined for both Open Door staff and patients, who often have to go back and forth between clinics. Also, these two buildings were very old and if something catastrophic should happen, the Arcata clinic has no other place to offer services.

The health center building currently under construction as seen from Foster

“The reason for the new building is the precarious nature of the old facilities in which we operate,” said Spetzler. “None of the buildings were ever intended as a clinic. And we did what we could to make them clinics, with lots of exam rooms and funky offices and all. But there were two front desks, two labs, two medical records departments, and two call departments…. It’s not efficient.”

Due to the more efficient operation, the new facility will require fewer staff than the two clinics. But that doesn’t mean there will be layoffs. Open Door has a fairly high turnover rate in some HR departments and often works with staff shortages. Spetzler said any employees at the two Arcata clinics not housed at the new facility will likely be able to transfer to one of Open Door’s other locations in the county.

The new building is much larger than the existing Arcata locations, totaling 34,000 square feet, which is 1,000 square feet larger than the two clinics combined. The space will house 34 examination rooms, one more than the other clinics combined. With a little more space, new facilities and equipment, and a more efficient workflow, the new clinic should be able to accommodate an increased number of patients and annual visits. However, the difference is not huge. Open Door estimates the new clinic will be able to accommodate approximately 14,000 patients, compared to 13,396 currently treated at Arcata Clinics. Visits are also expected to increase from 43,306 to 44,000 per year.

If you’re an open-door patient, you may already know that parking can be a problem at the other Arcata clinics, as each only has 10 on-site parking spaces. The new clinic has almost 100 parking spaces, some with charging stations for electric vehicles, said Spetzler.

Of course, as with all new developments in Arcata, the city wants the facility to discourage driving and encourage other modes of transportation. Spetzler said employees are being offered incentives to use other modes of transportation, including free bus tickets and possibly cash rewards if they don’t drive their cars.

Another feature of the new clinic is a staff gym with showers and changing rooms. Spetzler said that’s a request from many employees so they don’t have to leave the building to train. The availability of showers and changing rooms will also help encourage employees to cycle to work if they are able, as they can clean up and change into work clothes upon arrival.

The new building is also equipped with solar panels and will have backup generators. This means the clinic can serve as an emergency center during major power outages, providing community members with a place to charge their devices, get clean water refills, etc.

Though most of the services offered by the clinic will remain the same, Spetzler said there will be an expansion in behavioral health care, including things like mental health and drug use counseling. Thanks to some funding provided by the Vesper Society of San Francisco, Spetzler said Open Door will focus on offering more of these services, especially for families.

Spetzler said Open Door is also working with the new clinic to expand other services and programs, such as nurse residencies, in the future. She is very excited about the opening of the new clinic and would like to thank the city of Arcata and the community for their support.

“We had these neighborhood meetings and we definitely listened to what the neighbors wanted and we had almost no complaints,” Spetzler said. “There’s actually been a pretty impressive lack of complaints from the neighborhood considering we’re building this huge thing.”

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UNTIL NOW:

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The New York Times

“Belonging Is Stronger Than Facts”: The Age of Misinformation

There’s a good chance you’ve received at least one of these rumors, all of which are false, and were recently brought to you as fact: President Joe Biden plans to force Americans to eat less meat; that Virginia eliminates advanced math in schools to promote racial equality; and that border officials are buying bulk copies of Vice President Kamala Harris’s book to distribute to refugee children. All were reinforced by partisan actors. But it’s just as likely, if not more likely, that you passed it on from someone you know. And you may have noticed that these cycles of false indignation keep recurring. Sign up for The Morning Newsletter from the New York Times. We are in an era of endemic misinformation – and utter disinformation. Lots of bad actors support the trend. However, some experts believe that the real drivers are social and psychological forces that people tend to share and believe in misinformation. And these forces are just on the rise. “Why do misperceptions about contentious issues in politics and science seem so persistent and difficult to correct?” Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist from Dartmouth College, featured in a new article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It is not for lack of good information that is ubiquitous. Anyway, contact with good information does not reliably convey precise convictions. Rather, Nyhan writes that increasing evidence suggests that the ultimate culprits are “cognitive and memory impairments, directional motivations in defense or support of a group identity or belief, and messages from other people and political elites”. In simpler terms, people become more prone to misinformation when three things happen. First, and perhaps most importantly, when conditions in society cause people to have a greater need for what social scientists call grouping – a belief that their social identity is a source of strength and superiority and that of others Groups can be held accountable for their problems. As much as we like to think of ourselves as rational beings who put truth-finding above all else, we are social animals wired for survival. In times of perceived conflicts or social changes, we look for security in groups. And that makes us eager to consume information, whether true or not, that enables us to see the world as a conflict that places our righteous group against a nefarious outgroup. This need can arise in particular from a feeling of social destabilization. As a result, misinformation is common in communities that feel destabilized by undesirable change or, for some minorities, are powerless in the face of dominant forces. Viewing everything as a major conflict against scheming enemies can feel tremendously comforting. And therefore, perhaps the greatest culprit of our era, more than any other misinformation, is the era-defining rise in social polarization. “At the mass level, major partisan divisions in social identity create intense hostility towards opposition partisans,” which “appears to have increased the vulnerability of the political system to partisan misinformation,” Nyhan wrote in an earlier article. Growing hostilities between the two halves of America fuel social distrust, making people more vulnerable to rumors and falsehood. It also makes people cling much more closely to their partisan identity. And once our brains go into identity-based conflict mode, we become desperately hungry for information that confirms how we feel about them, and much less worried about things like truth or accuracy. In an email, Nyhan said it could be methodologically difficult to pinpoint the exact relationship between general polarization in society and general misinformation, but there is ample evidence to suggest that a person with more polarized views is more prone to believe in Will falsehood. The second driver of the era of misinformation is the emergence of high-profile political figures who encourage their followers to give in to their desire for identity-affirming misinformation. After all, an atmosphere of overarching political conflict often benefits these leaders, at least in the short term, by gathering people behind them. And then there’s the third factor – a shift to social media, which is a powerful medium for disinformation composers, an ubiquitous vector for misinformation itself, and a multiplier of the other risk factors. “The media has changed, the environment has changed, and that has potentially huge implications for our natural behavior,” said William Brady, a social psychologist at Yale University. “When you post things, you are very aware of the feedback you get, the social feedback on likes and shares,” said Brady. So when misinformation appeals to more social impulses than the truth, it gets more exposure online, which means people feel rewarded and encouraged for spreading it. “Depending on the platform, people are very sensitive to social rewards,” he said. Research shows that people who receive positive feedback for posting inflammatory or false statements are more likely to do so again in the future. “You are affected by it.” In 2016, media scholars Jieun Shin and Kjerstin Thorson analyzed a data set of 300 million tweets from the 2012 election. They found that Twitter users “selectively exchange fact-checking messages that cheer their own candidate and denigrate the opposing party candidate”. And when users came across a fact check that revealed that their candidate had done something wrong, their response wasn’t to be angry with the politician for lying. It should attack the fact checkers. “We found that Twitter users tend to retweet to agree, argue, attract attention and entertain,” wrote researcher Jon-Patrick Allem last year, summarizing a study he co-authored. “The truthfulness of a post or the correctness of a claim was not an identified motivation for retweeting.” In another study published in Nature last month, a team of psychologists tracked thousands of users who interacted with incorrect information. Republican test subjects who were shown the wrong headline about migrants attempting to enter the United States (“Over 500 migrant caravans arrested in suicide vests”) largely identified it as incorrect; only 16% said it was precise. But when the experimenters instead asked subjects if they should share the headline, 51% said they would. “Most people don’t want to spread misinformation,” the study’s authors wrote. “But the social media context focuses their attention on factors other than truth and accuracy.” In a highly polarized society like the United States of today – or even India or parts of Europe – these incentives have a strong impact on solidarity within the group and the exemption outside the group. They don’t much prefer the consensus reality or abstract ideals of accuracy. As people become more susceptible to misinformation, opportunists and charlatans are also better able to take advantage of this. That can mean that promising populists smash the establishment and control minorities. It can also mean that government agencies or freelance hacker groups are stirring up social divisions overseas in their favor. But the roots of the crisis go deeper. “The problem is that when we encounter opposing views in the age and context of social media, it’s not like reading them alone in a newspaper,” wrote sociologist Zeynep Tufekci in a widely used MIT Technology Review Items. “It’s like hearing them from the opposing team while you’re sitting in a football stadium with our fellow fans. We are connected to our communities online and ask our like-minded colleagues for approval. We bond with our team by yelling at each other’s fans. “In an ecosystem where this sense of identity conflict is pervasive, she wrote,” Belonging is stronger than facts. “This article originally appeared in the New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company

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