Look What We Made!

Yup - it's a real, working fire. No smoke in the basement. We had the fireplaces and chimneys inspected today, and it went really well. Nothing wrong on the inside; they fixed our wonky old dampers, cleaned a ton of junk out of the upstairs fireplace above the damper, and - the most important bit - removed the metal caps that had been placed on top of the chimneys! Oh, duh - we didn't know about those, and that's why the last time we tried to light a fire the basement filled up with smoke.

So as soon as the guys left Greg built a fire in the pub fireplace, and it's a beautiful thing - working great.

The chimney guy said that there was some erosion and wear on the outside that will need repaired at some point in the future, but it wasn't anything major now, nothing we needed to concern ourselves with immediately, so ... I'm taking his word for it. We have enough other things to do right now without worrying about that, and we'll have him back to inspect once a year, he'll tell me when it needs done, and we'll deal with it then. (And I like that he didn't immediately try to scare us into having a bunch of stuff done that really didn't need done right now, just to get the money).

This weekend is the kids' first weekend here, so last night we had dinner in the pub.


I have a ton and a half of things to do, but now I'm really having trouble dragging myself out of the pub with our cozy fire.