Rebuilding My House

Chimney, April 2010

While fitting the kitchen, I looked up the chimney and saw a nest, ignored it, and fitted the kitchen so that I'd never be able to get to it from there again. Several years later, several dead jackdaws in the spare bedroom and countless carpet bugs and grit falling down the back of the cupboards into the kitchen, I thought it was time to get up there and sort it out.

The scaffolders did exactly what I asked and made the world's biggest scaffolding tower to get up to the chimney. I knew Luke wouldn't mind it, so I invited him up for the weekend to give me a hand. Like everything in my house, one thing led to another, and before long we'd dismantled a good portion of the chimney stack before we decided that we'd better stop. We failed to get the nest out, and the job dragged on into the next week. Luckily Dad came to help, and we finished rebuilding the chimney, added ducting for an extractor fan to the kitchen, and most importantly, an anemometer. The chimney was sealed up again, except for a few air bricks. Sadly the jackdaw nest is still in place, and will need to be extracted from one of the bedrooms, at which point the ducting will magically descend to the kitchen and an extractor fan can be fitted - another stupid omission while fitting it!