This is the start of the really disruptive prep and i was eager to get it done so without a doubt i over did it. Sarah has gone out east to visit her family and the offspring so i lost my voice of reason and moderation. Sitting here on the sofa now and looking through the gap from the fireplace though i am glad that i got it done. The floor is mopped, the kitchen is dusted, and life is returning to normal
We got the final floorplans with the last tweaks to the basement kitchen layout and we are both happy with how it came together. Now we can start working on the exterior and site plan which should be less work now that we have what we want inside. Dean the Builder also stopped by with an HVAC guy to look at our plans and space so we can get an estimate on a heat pump. We had started with a plan for electric baseboard heaters in the basement but that just seems like a cop out. They really restrict how furniture can get laid out and are not the most efficient. It seems like a decision we would regret in the future. Once i have the estimate i’ll follow up with Vancouver Heritage and other grant providers and see if we will still qualify if we are keeping our forced air gas furnace and are just adding a heat pump for shoulder season heat and summer cooling.
Friday night i got started with the prep for the actual chimney removal. This involved clearing out the chimney end of the kitchen and draping as much as possible in drop sheets. Once the space was cleared i took down the range hood and cabinet above the stove. I have wanted to do this for 15 years and almost have on several occasions. The fan has never worked in the 15 years we have been here. Looking at it on my stack of rubbish on the driveway it really is amazing that i didn’t take it our years ago. It is a health hazard. I helped my dad install a new one a couple of years ago, and helped Lee install one just a few months ago. It isn’t hard, so what stopped me? I guess when it comes down to it i realized that the job was much bigger than “just” replacing the range hood. We always knew the cabinet was going to go and i just didn’t want to spend the money to buy something that was just going to be demolished at some point in the future. I guess with the benefit of hindsight, we could have had a fan in our kitchen for canning season for the last 15 years and maybe that wouldn’t have been all bad.
Saturday was a marathon. I was at it by 8 am after hanging curtains half way through the kitchen and building a bit of a wall with kitchen chairs i quickly opened up the wall. My theory was that the mortar dust would be heavy and wouldn’t drift as badly as drywall dust. It was a good theory but not true. Now we know. The chimney tapered above the fireplace to half of the space was just traditional plaster lathe. The chimney itself was part of the actual wall and the plaster had been applied right to the bricks. It is actually pretty amazing workmanship as you couldn’t tell from outside at all. Again the bricks came down pretty easily but there was a heck of a lot of going up and down the ladder at the beginning. The really hard part was loading them into buckets and hauling them out the kitchen, down the stairs and into the pile in yard. Eventually i reduced the bucket loads by a brick to make it more manageable as our back stairs are a bit sketchy. I took a break for coffee at about 10 am but realized i was too filthy to sit in the house so sat out front for a bit. I was really glad that the weather was mixed because had it been hot, i don’t think i would have gotten it all done.
After my break another session got the chimney down to the level of the fireplace. Behind the flue was absolutely full of sand and ash and other debris. The neighbourhood crows even stashed a few chicken bones in there at some point. I took out three bucket loads of stuff from in there. I cleared up all the bricks i had removed and swept up as i really wasn’t sure i was going to get back to it after lunch, before stopping for lunch. I washed up as best i could and my lunch break was a variation on an old Benny’s Bagels classic “Double Cheese Melt” with smoked salmon. I ate it sitting outside watching it rain. The bagel was so good. Likely the best i have ever had.
After lunch i slowed the pace right down and tried to figure out how to get apart the firebox. It was curved on all three sides and then boxed between chimney brick columns. The chimney on the left is where our original furnace and hot water tank vented but there seemed to be no purpose to the gap left on the right The firebricks were totally different than the rest of the chimney and still pretty sound which changed the job a lot. Rather than taping with my hammer to get a brick out i had to work hard with the chisel. Eventually i found that i was able to get my crowbar between the firebox and the columns of regular bricks on each side. It is was usually the chimney bricks that failed first but managed to loosen things up a bit. I also just hammered a bunch so post came out in pieces. As i was working low down i didn’t have the space to stack up a ton of bricks so every 30 bricks or so i took a couple of loads out to the pile. I was likely working at half the speed as i had in the morning. If that.
Eventually i realized i was too tired to carry on and collapsed with a heating pad on the sofa after a glorious hot shower. I managed to get out to get some takeout for dinner and after watching some TV i did one last short session before bed.
Sunday i had help coming so after having instant espresso thanks to an old electric kettle i found, I slowly plugged away at what was left. It is actually incredibly satisfying because unlike my day job i can really see the progress I am making. Unfortunately that makes it hard for me to stop sometimes. This is why i don’t go into casinos. I didn’t mean to but i ended up taking out the fireplace including the base and by the time Ric arrived to help i was pretty much done. The fireplace front was made of different bricks and when levering at some of the firebricks it just started to come apart. I had already broken through the base and opened up the chimney base and luckily i had the presence of mind to pull the bricks towards me when a large section started to pivot and it just dropped into the hold. It would have done a ton of damage to the floor if it had gone the other way. I got Rick to work on some tenacious firebricks at the front of the hearth that were stuck 10 times as hard as any of the others. I thought i was just too tired to make any progress and i was glad to see Ric struggling as well. After he got the first out i realized that they were actually set into concrete. Turns out our hearth tiles are embedded in a concrete base. I took a look underneath and sure enough the concrete is attached to the chimney right above our gas line and a hot water line. We decided to stop and i need to think about how we want to deal with that before we take down the basement part of the chimney. Ric also helped take out the remaining bricks that i was thinking were supporting the mantel (they weren’t) and helped me haul out 3 garbage cans i had overloaded and assumed i would just leave in the kitchen and empty them in bucket loads over the week. We finished by cleaning out some of the basement around the chimney so we are ready to get rolling on that when the time is right.
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