Tuesday, November 20, 2007

My fireplace

I had my fireplace looked at and cleaned by a local chimney sweep outfit today. I have to say that they did not want to clean it, largely because they didn't want me to waste my money. Alas! There will be no cheery fires at my house this winter as the chimney is not in good shape nad prolly is not worth the money needed to fix it. I just liked the thought of the damned thing being clean. :P

Apparently at some time in the past the chimney was damaged enough to get a rebuild from the roofline up. A poorly done rebuild. The chimney guy said that he's not 100% sure he can put in the required liner tile and seal it enough to get the whole thing up to code and safe because of bad materials used in the fix. Bleh. The other thing is that it has no smoke chamber, something common to the fireplaces built in my neighborhood. He says it's prolly because most folks burned coal in this neighborhood. Oh well. Candles will look pretty in there.

His suggestion was to either put in a gas log or a wood burning insert, complete with stainless steel liner. Gas I'm not excited about, but the insert is gorgeous. It's also *cough* a $4000.00 job. Candles will look pretty in there. :)

2 comments:

Jennifer said...

Candles will look pretty in there :). At least you have a fireplace to put candles in!

Amalie said...

We thought our fireplace was only good for the gas logs that were in it, so we discussed retrofitting the space for A/V stuff and putting an antique screen up to hide it (I hate seeing all the cords and buttons and flashing "12:00"s)...But we lucked out-- a friend of ours used to be a chimney sweep and it turns out we have a wood-burning fireplace; someone tried to concrete it up, and thankfully for us, did a bad job. A few adjustments, a little cash, some elbow grease and a case of beer should hopefully make it usable by next winter...Otherwise, it's AV storage or candles for us, too.