AUG. 9 UPDATE: Nearly ready to turn the heat on!

I am missing a key picture of progress for today: A photo of the finished chimney! Naptime and rain interfered with my photo opportunities, so I'll have to get that picture taken tomorrow.

In any case, the chimney is finished! Don arrived late last night, and by 9 this morning he and Dave were out working on getting the chimney installed. Dave perched himself on top of the roof, and Don climbed up the tall ladder inside.


After using a laser level to figure out just exactly where to put the hole for the chimney, Dave cut out the hole for it. That was tricky enough -- I still don't really know how they lined up everything inside and outside -- but the really challenging part was getting the chimney in place.

They tied a rope to a length of 2-by-4 and threaded the rope through the bottom of the chimney, which is basically a 7-foot-long shiny tube, so they'd have a way to lift it. The goal was to get the tube up into place -- sticking out through the hole in the roof, and set down into the metal box Dave had put into place earlier. The chimney was very slippery, however, and Dave didn't have a good way to maneuver it from his perch on the roof. Don tried to help the first time by pushing up from his position on the ladder (about 20 feet in the air), but he could only get a few fingers below it (and it was fairly heavy) without leaning too far out.

They eventually got it into place by moving the ladder so Don could push up from straight below the chimney tube, balancing it on his head at one point to get a better grip.

I was helping (mostly just watching) with this project from the safety of the stairs, so I didn't get any pictures of this work.

There was several more hours of work getting the rest of the chimney parts in place, but by the time the men came in for a late lunch, the chimney was there, in all its shiny metal glory!

... Then, after lunch, they started in on the next project: Getting the 475-pound stove into the house from the van.

I didn't actually see how this was accomplished -- I was saddled with the duty of putting Sofia and Erik (and their sleep-deprived mother) down for their naps, so I didn't get out to see the event until it was nearly over.

The plan had been for Dave to call the neighbors, the Petersons, over to help when he was ready for a crew of brute strength. The neighbors had a work weekend at their farm, and they said yesterday when they stopped over to ask if we had any scrap lumber (we had a little to spare, I think) that they could help with that project today.

Well, it turned out that Dale and Connie Groop drove up just as Dave was getting ready to call the Petersons. "You're here just in time," Dave told them, and he talked Dale into helping with their moving project. Dale is known for being clever with such engineering problems, so we were happy he showed up at that moment and was willing to help.

So how did they do it? Well, first they backed the van up onto blocks, so it was at the same level as the door into the house. Then they put rollers -- steel cylinders (my dad is holding one in the photo above) -- under the pallet that the stove was on, and by moving the rollers ahead as needed, they got the stove into its spot on the tile pad.

The idea of rollers was my dad's -- he gave the example of St. Luke's hospital in Aberdeen, a four-story building that was moved several blocks by using rollers.

But the stove was still on the pallet. How could they get the palette out from underneath the stove?


Well, they built up another platform under the stove, using scrap 2-by-4s, as you can see in the photos, until the stove was resting on the platform they'd built and not the pallet. Then they unbolted the stove from the pallet and pulled it out from under the stove. Then, using a crowbar to lift and lower the beams of the platform, they pulled the scrap 2-by-4s out from under the stove, one by one, until the stove was resting on the tile pad.


Voila! A stove (nearly) in place! (It will still need some slight adjusting when the stovepipe is put in.)

... As I mentioned, it did rain this evening, and Dave was pleased to see that there were no leaks, despite the hole he'd cut into the roof just that morning. Apparently they'd installed the chimney correctly!

... After all that work, by late afternoon, the men were told to quit for the day. So we even had a little music in the evening! Mary played her mandolin, Dave played guitar, and Sofia added a little "picking" of her own.

... OK, off to bed for me! Erik's next feeding is surely impending.