The Light Lens: Snowball

by T. Touris – 

Before the flakes began to fly, we had our old block chimney and wood stove cleaned and inspected in order to prepare for the cold nights to come.  Much not to our surprise, the creosote-encrusted structure did not pass muster.  The thoughts of evenings sitting around the forced hot air duct left us a little cold. So began our project to get the crackle and smell of burning logs back into our domicile.

Our chimney sweep proposed lining the old chimney with a shiny stainless steel, insulated liner, capable of withstandingtemperatures found at the interior of the sun. The price would be approximately $1 per degree per foot.

While mulling this over, the days grew shorter and the cold began to set in. The cold seems to either suppress my do nothing neurons, or stimulate my do something neurons. I’ll leave it to the brain scientists to figure that out.  In any case, my winter time itch to build something needed to be scratched.

We started with a nice, reasonably sized project:  Get our chimney back in working order.

 

I don’t know if it’s the beautiful hills in our area that called to us, but we decided to take our nice little snowball of a project to the top of Crazy Homeowner Hill and give it a push. Since then, it’s been smashing everything in its path: drywall, flooring, electrical, etc. The snow boulder now consists of this:

Tear down the chimney. Open up the wall between our living room and sunroom.  Move the old new stove into the living room. Reverse the basement steps, move the furnace, build new L-shaped steps to the upstairs, enlarge the stairwell, rebuild the foyer closet, take down the living room ceiling, enlarge the upstairs bathroom, replace the upstairs carpeting with wood floor, build a kiln to dry wood we mill ourselves for the new flooring…

When you’re trapped inside a giant snowball, no one can hear you scream. With luck, it’ll be melted before next winter.