Since people have been wondering and even asking me in the grocery store parking lot, "What are you guys doing up on the roof?" I'll tell you: Today Nate and I put in a chimney.
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| I'm belaying the chimney while Nate makes adjustments |
This is about a week after we took out the beast, which weighs more than me, and lowered it more than 25 feet to the ground for repairs. Repairs like relocating the flashing and painting it copper, along with figuring out how to keep the roof from leaking and down-drafts from smoking out the house from here on out. This is the chimney from the original building and it really is part of the original silhouette, so I feel responsible to make sure that in updating its function, we don't change the aesthetic.
The story behind this is that the chimney vents the original fireplace in our kitchen. When we bought the house in 2010 there was nothing connecting that fireplace to the chimney coming out of the roof. When we opened up the drop-ceiling in the upstairs bedroom, we found they had simply cut out that middle section, presumably to avoid bringing the chimney up to code when they added a dormer to the upstairs room in the eighties. About a year and a half ago, Nate put in some stove pipe to get the fireplace working again and we found that it functioned horribly. It would smoke us out every time. The solution, in our case, turned out to be to add height and insulation to the pipe outside.
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| Kitchen fireplace |
My husband is really quite amazing and can, among a thousand other things, fabricate metal and make this whole thing happen. The boring things I can tell you about today are that we 1) hoisted the chimney two stories up onto our steeple with the knowledge and skills only rock climbers possess, 2) drilled and bolted through metal and into rock and 3) secured roof flashing. If you don't know what "flashing" is (I didn't, before home-ownership), it's the metal collar around skylights, chimneys and such on a roof, which keeps water out of the seams and, subsequently, your house. At one point I said to Nate:
"People get paid a lot of money to do what you do."
"Too bad I'm not one of them," he replied.
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| Nate and our neighbor, Mike, in a brainstorming session |
It occurred to me today, while I was on the tippie-top of the roof of our church house, that the reason I love this place isn't because I feel fondly for her, it's because I serve her. My husband and I give so much of our time, money and bodies to make her better and therefore her successes are our successes and her failures are our as well. It also occurred to me that it's the same with people. Love, that is. It's so hard to pinpoint how love is more than a feeling but the reality is that love is not love unless it costs us something. Then, standing there on the steeple of this old church, I realized that this place isn't just my home or my project, she is also my teacher.
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| My rooftop classroom |
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| Nate perched on the steeple, waiting for sunset |
