Chimney!

A new year, a new resolution to catch up on blog posts now that the post-Christmas gluttonfest is over.

Let's go back to a few weekends ago when my dad was suckered into coming over and helping us out.  A large, unreversible project has been looming literally over our heads for awhile: installing a chimney for a woodstove.  While the desire to install a woodstove has been pretty desperate, it has taken us until our third winter of living here to get to the point of actually being able to do so.  Gabe's grandparents had had one in the basement hooked up to the same chimney as the oil-burning boiler.  The stove itself was pretty rotten (also, the basement can get wet), so it was disconnected probably after his grandfather passed away in 1996, although we were the ones to actually discard it in 2009.  We didn't want the stove to be in the basement, because the fire should be where you actually hang out.  We briefly toyed with the idea of tapping into the aforementioned chimney on the first floor, but our consciences got the best of us because mixing multiple appliances burning multiple fuels on the same chimney is not terribly encouraged in the modern code books. Also, doing that would render essentially useless the already narrow doorway from the living room to the kitchen.  Not good.

We settled on the idea of installing an entirely new metalbestos chimney in the corner of the living room on an outside wall of the house.  There, we could run it straight up through the corner of a closet on the second floor, and then right up into the attic and out the roof.  Assuming, of course, all the joists and rafters were lined up and we wouldn't have to go around them in some awkward way. Of course, we had to take down the wall between the living room and entry way, or else the stove would be square in the middle of the door between the two. Luckily, there were about 100 other reasons to take that wall down.  Once we did that, we'd just have to cross our fingers and hope that Mr. Fred Aubin and his trusty sidekick Frank B. Edgerly (the guys who autographed our woodwork) had aligned the floor joists and roof rafters correctly.

Since we just replaced our living room ceiling, we were smart enough to mark the joists and the strapping in that corner before painting.  Our rooms in general aren't very big, and there are lots of windows and radiators to avoid, so we really wanted to get the stove as close to the wall as possible without, say, burning our house down.  After careful research and measuring, we were able to give the chimney its recommended clearance without having to come out farther into the room than we would have liked. Fred and Frank FTW.

Dad, his measuring sticks, and his square halo

The installation process for a metalbestos chimney is fairly straightforward.  You order the stuff you need, open the boxes, pull the directions out of the boxes, and follow them.  The hard part is committing to cutting holes in your ceilings, floors, and roof.  But after two and a half years of thinking and yearning, we were ready.

I cannot reiterate often enough that the stakes are high for not following the directions, i.e., your house will burn down.  So we built 2x4 frames to support the chimney as it passed through the ceilings and floors, and used the special collar to ensure the proper 2" clearance.

Gabe inspects our work from below

Here's an example of how overbuilt our house is.  Even the baseboards in the closet are nailed down beneath  the floorboards.  And notice that there's wallpaper behind that.

This got me thinking.  Remember all that stuff we found in the ceiling? I wondered how it all got there, because the flooring is all pretty tight tongue-and-groove stuff.  It couldn't have snuck through there. However, now I know how incredibly long it takes to do house projects.  First, you would lay the subfloor, in this case, 1" rough-sawn lumber with decent cracks in between.  Then you would install lath.  Then plaster.  Then the wallpaper.  Then the baseboards and trim.  And then the floors!  That's a loooong time to drop all that little stuff through the subfloor.  Makes sense.

Gabe pawed through the blown-in insulation in the attic to locate the joists up there so we could build the necessary frame.  It turned out they lined right up with the joists between the first and second floors.

In goes the attic piece.  That's where we quit for the day, as none of us is quite prepared to actually cut through the roof.  We're looking into hiring a genuine pro for that one. However, note how the chimney will have the exact amount of clearance necessary to bypass that roof rafter.  So, we made it all the way up through the house without requiring any offsets.  I'd like to say that we were able to measure it so precisely, but all credit is due to Fred and Frank and their superior building skills.