Have the chimney professionally installed to code and make sure your insurance company knows it. The chimney should be at least three feet higher than the peak of your roof.. You should have double-wall pipe at the very least. Double-wall will help keep creosote deposits down to a minimum. Running the stove full-throttle about 30 minutes per week helps keep creosote deposits down. Of course using the driest wood you can find minimizes creosote build up as well as a higher operation temperature.

Excel chimneys and pipe are the absolute best there is. Selkirk Metalbestos is probably the most common chimney in use in AK, and they are good. But Excel can withstand several chimney fires where a Selkirk should probably be replaced. You can research them to see the design and material differences in them.

You can put cement board down on the floor where the stove is going to sit and on the wall behind it, slate the floor and maybe put brick cut in half lengthwise on the wall behind it. There's no need to go higher than the height of the stove unless you want to. If the stove is sitting 18" or further away from the wall, there's no real reason to brick or shield it. But a nice slate pad trimmed in brick looks nice for the stove to sit on.

My recommendation is if your house size, design and layout permits it, place the stove in the most central location you can without it getting in the way. It will heat more evenly than trying to push heat from a corner to heat the far reaches of the rest of the residence.

If you already heat with a gas or oil furnace there should already be a fresh air intake somewhere. That should be sufficient to supply combustion air to your woodstove. The only real problems you could run into is if you have a heat/air-conditioning recovery ventilation system. In that case that whole system would have to be rebalanced to make sure your ventilation system isn't at negative pressure when using the stove.

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Z