Well, the joke is on me, apparently

Michael and I were really glad when the home renovations that we started this year came to a close.  So glad that we decided we were done with major projects for a long, long time.  We thought we’d tackle some minor things.  With home ownership, as we’ve discovered, there isn’t ever a time when there aren’t ANY projects.

So we decided to have the liner and cap put on the chimney.  This also would involve some reworking of the interior of the chimney, which our chimney guy (we’ll call him “Aaron,”  since that’s his name) had told us about upon doing the estimate.  If we get the work done now, we reasoned, we’d be able to have fires in the winter.  Aaron had discovered some pretty extensive wearing away of the mortar in the chimney, which is dangerous, since if it wears all the way away, there would be nothing to keep sparks from going inside the wall and setting the house on fire.  Since we didn’t want our house set on fire, that seemed like something we should fix.

Well, things were going just fine until they started doing some of the demolition necessary to fix some of the things that were wrong.  Then some discoveries were made.  They first discovered that the fireplace was probably not an original part of the house, but was tacked on to the chimney that ran the exhaust from the original heating system (burning coal?) at some later date.

It turns out that our whole fireplace was put in wrong when it was tacked on.  There wasn’t a lintel to support the brick and mantel, just the front of the damper.  They had to get the saws-all to get the damper out, because they had to leave in the supporting piece so as not to have the brick and mantel falling down.

(That part led to some funny asides.  First of all, Hannah came in and told me that her instincts said I should take the breakable dancing man and woman off the mantel.  “The workers said that it was all going to come crashing down!”  I assured her that they’d let me know if that was really the case. 

Also, the bunnies are in a room not far from the action that’s going on with the chimney, and there’s not a door.  I thought about the saws-all and how LOUD it is and thought that I should at least get ONE door between them and the action.  So that meant that I needed to ask Aaron to let me know when they were going to use the saws-all so I could move the rabbits.  Blank looks.  Really?  Not every client has rabbits whose hearing and fear have to be taken into account for a job?)

Things weren’t sealed properly, the smoke chamber (to funnel the smoke up the chimney) wasn’t there at all, the sides of the fireplace were open to the firebox – and full of wood that was coated in creosote – the sides of the fireplace (open to the firebox) were not properly sealed by the wall, so there was a distinct chance that sparks getting through would set fire to the creosote-coated wood and then set fire to the house…in the living room. 

Which means…we could either put the front back on the fireplace and pretend this never happened, in addition to not having fires in the fireplace until it gets fixed, OR we could have them tear it all out and rebuild it.  Not the chimney, thank God!, but the fireplace itself.  It doesn’t make a lot of sense to us to close it up and pretend it never happened, since we do like having fires and it will have to be dealt with eventually. 

This is somewhat amusing, since we’d been considering various options for changing the fireplace.  Right now it’s painted brick – not my favorite look – and we’d talked about sandblasting it or perhaps tiling over it, something to make it look nicer.  This was a project that was pretty low on the list, since it was aesthetic.

NOW, though, it’s a safety hazard!  Whoohoo!  New fireplace!

Of course, this means we have to decide what we want and find it.  That wasn’t really on my list of things to do, but I guess it’s just been added.

And after this, maybe we should swear off ALL house projects, even minor ones, for a while.  They all turn out to be major.