Black Boogers

A couple of months ago a friend started remodeling his bathroom.  Unfortunately for our friend he had more ambition than mechanical knowledge in the plumbing and electrical trades.  Friend and hubby worked out a deal if Hubby would help him with the mechanicals of the bathroom and teach him some basics along the way, Friend's father-in-law, who is a roofing and siding contractor, (and actually  did our roof last summer) would come help and teach Hubby how to roof on our little garage.

Anyway, Hubby spent several evenings and a few weekend days teaching Friend basic wiring and plumbing while working on his new bathroom.  This last weekend while we were away for the "Kamporee" - have to write a post on that later - roofing contractor father-in-law decided this would be the weekend to tackle our garage roof and had a small dumpster delivered to our yard.

This weekend the guys crawled on the roof, stripped a layer of shingles and put up new.  A huge improvement over the old which were peeling off at an alarming rate every time we had strong winds.

Sunday evening as we were admiring the new roof the discussion that we only had a 1/4 full construction dumpster that is paid the same if it's full or empty arose.  Hubby and I in penny pinching ways decided to start tearing out the old cookstove chimney in the kitchen.  The top had been removed during the re-roof but we still had bring going to the foundation.  Why you may ask would be crazy enough to take on three stories of chimney?  Well the answer is two fold 1) It will free up about 4 sq feet of  closet space and in a 120 year old house that's gold 2) it will allow me to move the refrigerator  from the far wall in the kitchen closer to the actual work area saving numerous steps around the kitchen per meal.

After all our roofing help left Sunday evening we fed the kids peanut butter and Jelly, told mom to fend for herself and got to work in the attic.  What a hot and nasty job it proved to be.  We started off gently lowering the bricks in a five gallon bucket from an attic window, but after about 5 hauls down decided to sacrifice the flowerbed.  With a sickening thud we watched my struggling impatiens (they never looked like much this year)  literally explode as three pound cream city bricks were dropped three stories from the attic window.

Sunday we made good progress as there was room in the attic to swing a large, heavy hammer and we reached the ceiling of the second floor pretty quickly and called it quits.  Monday, Hubby asked me to try to pull the plaster and lath from the chimney in the closet so he could get a good start after work.  This is wear things got interesting, since it appears when you plaster over brick, lath is not needed as plaster sticks really well to brick.

I chipped and chiseled a good part of the afternoon and removed a few rows of brick in between doing loads of laundry.  This process stirs up an enormous amount of dust, both from the chipping plaster but 120 year old mortar and soot from coal cooking fires of yesteryear.  Miserable and after a while forces you wash hands and clear nasal passages frequently - black boogers.

Hubby came home from work and real progress was made just simply because he's about ten times stronger than I and we got about 2/3 of the chimney removed from the second floor.  Tuesday, I again entered the the dust pit and inflicted damaged on the old chimney with Hubby coming home to work it down to the floor / ceiling of the first floor.  This is where we are stalled now as that will create a HUGE mess in the kitchen which will impact just about everything in the household. 

Sometime on Tuesday evening Hubby and I were pointing fingers at just who's wise idea tackling this project was.  Now, I'm beginning to wonder if that little bit of closet space and the ability to move the fridge is worth it.

Do you reckon you can get black lung from tearing down on sooty chimney?