More flue fitting

On Thursday, rather than spending the day playing in the garage, I spent the day playing on a mate's roof. As he's not overly comfortable with heights, and lives in a 4 storey house, there was no way in hell that he'd be willing to climb up the scaffolding and sit on the chimney. The scaffolding was there as the lunatic had spent two weeks off work re-pointing the gable end. And being a tall house, there was a lot of it to do!! He's not ordered a stove yet, as we'll have to sort the hearth out with Building Control first as it's on the first floor. This means there's no concrete slab to use as a nice base, just the wooden joists.

So Thursday arrived, and up the scaffold we went. The plan was to fit the liner to one of his two chimneys and matching cowls to both pots. There was 12 metres of liner to fit, leaving plenty left over for trimming back later on when we fit the stove. This is the view from the top, and why I'm glad we only have two cowls to fit as they're £50+ each. Some of the neighbours have five pots!

The first thing to do was to make sure we could drop a pull rope down the chimney and to the correct fireplace. The chimney we're lining has at least two fireplaces, so a set of drain rods were pushed up so we could tie the rope off before pulling it back down. This is much easier than just hoping for the best!

Or, it would have been if the rods went all the way up the chimney. But they jammed about 7-8 feet down from the pot. And looking into it (something I really should have done first) revealed what looked like a plate of some sort. As it was so far down, we couldn't figure out what it was, or why it was there. It felt solid enough that we thought it was a plate with some loose debris on top of it.

As we thought it was solid, the only option was to remove it from the stack. And the only real way of doing that is to take some bricks out. Which revealed something different what we had expected. Due to being left open, the chimney had acquired a bird's nest at some point, which had then fallen in and jammed at the first bend. There was a total of 18" solid of old bird's nest, sticks and what not in there!

So now we knew the chimney was clear and we could get a pull rope all the way back down to the fireplace. My mate had also stopped panicking at this point. One thing making this all a little easier was the external soot door that his house has. This means less climbing all the way down the scaffold, into the house and back up again as we can just shout at each other through the hole. It will also mean that there's no need to work inside a tight chimney from below as the final joints can be done through the door.

Part of the difficulty in fitting a liner is dealing with 12 metres of coiled up tube whilst so far off the floor. It's too long to do by yourself and too heavy to sling around easily. But that's what mate's girlfriends are for! This is also further proof that there is nothing you can't do with enough insulation tape.

I wasn't able to take photos for a little while after this point as I was sat between the chimney pots shoving the liner in. But the next point was fitting the cowl to the liner and then the cowl to the pot. Whilst there was no need to fit a second cowl, the other chimney had slugs in it from where it has damp, so something to keep the worst of the rain and the birds out was a sensible idea whilst we had access. The second chimney will also be swept soon as well.

And that was it for working outside. We then moved into the house and started knocking the fireplace apart:

And that's the limit of progress for now, as the happy couple are off on holiday! We're not sure what's been done to the fireplace in the past, but there's clearly an additional set of bricks on the left, but without them the arch wouldn't be supported. Which makes little or no sense. Either way, the plan is to remove the new bricks and fit a lintel before doing much else. I'll report back when I'm next allowed near his house with a hammer. Assuming his girlfriend hasn't knocked it down first. She's an architect and a nutter with a hammer in hand.