the little joys of homeownership, part the second

So, we have a pellet stove. We've even managed to manhandle it into the basement, with minimal damage to us and it, and the incidental benefit of creating a cleaner, tidier, and more efficiently laid out basement mess to achieve this. It also got warm enough earlier today that I would have opened the windows anyway, so we're back up pretty close to 60 degrees for an indoor temperature.

Unfortunately, stove venting pipes are a bit difficult to get hold of, particularly in such quantities as we need to get all the way up the chimney. We were planning on living dangerously and trying to hook something up to the line the old furnace went out on, but fortunately we weren't able to find the parts for that either. Fortunately, I say, because when grauwulf went to chop apart the patch in the chimney stack to get the old liner out, this is what he found:



We appear to have a standard (ie, not heat resistant) brick chimney with no liner whatsoever, into which the gas furnace and the gas water heater have been venting, with no liners to make sure heat and fumes get all the way up out of the house, rather than getting distracted and wandering off into the walls on their way there. Furthermore, to shrink down the hole that once housed a pipe for an even more ancient oil heater, they concreted in some brick fragments they had lying around ("random disassociated bricks," as we'd say in the field) and when that cracked and started to leak, they covered it over with a layer of quickcrete or somesuch. So, tomorrow there will be measuring of the chimney and getting two venting pipes of the appropriate length, so that we can do the water heater, too.

grauwulf has no idea why this is the point at which I begin giggling madly. I say, "But it's funny!"