A Tale of Two Fireplaces

I wrote earlier about cleaning the fireplace in the bedroom, and discovering it's made from local stone.

It was blocked up a long time ago, we thought with foam blocks, but which turned out to be by the simple expedient of pulling down the metal shutter. At some later date someone had cut a hole in the shutter to take the chimney from a small wood burning heater, and this had subsequently been blocked with a foam sheet and plenty of spray expanding foam.

Yesterday was the day I decided it was time to clean this abomination. I wasn't looking forwards to it, nor did I have any plan.

Expansive foam is a tricky thing to remove so I started with that, slicing through it with a putty knife. Then, I just pulled at the metal shutters until they distorted enough to come out of their slots.

In a piece of excellent news, the firebox is in remarkably good condition, if full of stuff. The stuff was mainly rubble from when we had the top of the chimney rebuilt, old ash, cobwebs, two really tatty work gloves, and an almost new 8mm socket.

That filled three rubble sacks and two vacuum cleaner bags, and gave me an idea. But more of that after I try it today.

The second fireplace is the one in the salon that Mr Douady installed in 2009. It was looking sorry for itself, mainly through smoke and in ground ash.

I took a sander to it, and now it's looking much refreshed. Of course, that created more clouds of dust that I allowed to settle overnight before filling two vacuum cleaner bags. 

I'm getting good at dust, but the camera really doesn't like it. That's why some of the photos aren't really in sharp focus.