We got a new wood burning stove insert for our house this year. We put it in and… voila! It smoked up the house so we had to buy a chimney pipe to put into our chimney. Sigh. It was starting to get cold so I got to be Chris’ helper in this fun project.
After 2+ hours of cutting random pipes, metal, and cement out of our chimney (I don’t know why they were there… if you have ever been to my house you understand that nothing in it makes any sense whatsoever), we had to wrap the whole pipe in special insulation and then cover it with a mesh sock. This involved some fun glue that looked like silly string, and lots of fall leaves getting stuck in the mesh sock. Oops. Apparently this is not a good outdoor in the fall project.
Now the fun part. I got to hold the bottom of the pipe above my head to help Chris get it up the very tall ladder without knocking Chris off the ladder. It was an interesting experience, and luckily I did not manage to either fall off the ladder or knock Chris into the trees. Then I got to run inside and look for the rope dangling from the bottom of the pipe so I could attempt to pull the pipe into place while Chris shoved it down the chimney. I also managed to pull a whole bunch of ash onto my face in the process. Luckily Chris thinks ahead and we had moved all our cream furniture to the other side of the room and covered it in plastic.
And the stove now works! It is so much nicer than our old one with the added benefit that it actually fits inside our chimney without hanging out into the room. We used to have a huge baby gate around our old stove because it hung so far out in the room and we figured a kid would run into it if we didn’t fence it off. This stove does not require a huge gate taking up half our living room!!! Yay!!! And Chris is a really cute chimney sweep. And it old took five times of cleaning the floor with the steam mop to get all the ash off… We are all prepped for the winter and just in time, as we have already had snow.
