Wednesday, April 14, 2010

New Chimney - finally

When we bought our house, we were surprised that the chimney was on such a major slant. There were braces holding it up. Because of this, we thought it was falling down. Not the case. Our house is a victorian, and as such the builders made sure that everything was symetrical on the outside. Even if that mean things were wonky on the inside. They wanted the chimney in a certain place on the roofline, and therefore built the chimney on a slant since the furnace is (basically) in the center of the basement.

We had some issues with with our heating, and was told that the chimney was crumbling, and the debris was falling IN the chimney and clogging our furnace.

We were afraid that it would eventually fall over and crash into our second floor.

We finally had the money to replace it. We wanted to have it go straight up, since we plan on re-doing the attic eventually. This way, we can build around it and it will (now) only take up a 2x2 space. Before, because of the slant, it would be more like 2x8 - big difference :) The attic is so tall that they went straight up, and then at around 10 feet, they angled it toward where it meets the roofline.

You can still see the braces in the after pics, which is cool since you can really see how much more straight it is now. The braces don't do anything and will be taken down if/when we refinish the space.

The did not need any tools to take the bricks down, that is how bad they were. Not only that, but they took the bricks from the 3rd floor BY HAND in buckets. They made 3 trips of about 18 buckets each time. Did I mention that you have to go up about 14 steps just to get to my front door? So, 15 steps from the attic to the 2nd floor. 15 steps to the first floor. 14 steps to the street. Um, yeah - that is 45 steps. Thankfully it was not me :)

So - here are the pics:














This is where you can see the bend to the roof. Again, the brackets are doing nothing. But totally held the old chimney up.

2 comments:

Leah said...

Wow...that leaves a ton of room in your attic! Hopefully you will be able to finish that one day!

Julie G said...

I didn't even know you had an attic haha

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