Fshhh (noise of workman sucking air through teeth)

The stone mason came to look at the house to check out various things we were worried about. He confirmed we would at some point need to remove the render from the front of the house as it is concrete and therefore unsuitable for an old stone house due to it's lack of breathability. He looked at the fireplace in the living room/kitchen which I think I have mentioned before due to the rather excessive slope of the mantlepiece. After some examination he made fshhhh sucking of breath through teeth noise that builders/workmen/artisans make when they are about to tell you that something is a disaster and probably expensive to fix. After full investigation including removing the protective panelling and sticking his head up the chimney (we didn't tell him about the snakes that live up there) his diagnosis was that the best thing to do is remove the whole wall structure that creates the fireplace. This would leave only the brick chimney stack at the top and we would need to make a box around the metal pipe we need for the wood burning stove. On the whole it will be an improvement as the chimney is pretty big and we only use a small part of it for the wood burning stove. It is going to create an almighty mess though and it is hard to know when we should plan this in.
I braved the snakes to take a photo up the chimney but it doesn't really show very clearly the problem. The outside of the wall has plasterboard on it so we don't see any issues but on the inside you can see that the stones are falling apart from each other and the whole wall is slumping down - which is why the mantlepiece is sloping so much as it is being pushed down by the weight of the collapsing wall above.

You can see though how little of the space the chimney for the wood stove takes.