Guys This Week Was Rough

Alls well that ends well, but jfc this was the hardest thing I've done since October of 2023 when I had to crawl into the attic in Florida to do storm mitigation after Hurricane Ian (i think I didnt get pics that time, but THIS time I thought of ya'll and remembered I need pics).

So my old house has a chimney, bc it is from 1895 and thats how that works. The basement part has been questionable for a while. Last year i had some chimney guys come look at it and they were like "respectfully, no thank you." Which is fair, I have eyes, I saw what the thing looked like. (Well, one guy said he'd do it for $80,000 but lol. I do not have 80,000.)

But something had to be done. So it was already the number one most important 2025 project. We were just kind of still in the "figure out what to do" phase.

Last week when I was in saugatuck working on my bookshop, it rained. A lot. The chimney in the basement collapsed.

Somehow, the three stories of chimney above it DID NOT collapse!!! So the immediate, frantic, urgent task at hand became: stabilize this mother fucker. NOW. Before the other 3 stories of bricks falls down and causes serious damage to my beloved old house.

Im pleased to say that after three of the hardest days of my life, it's stable! We literally worked until my fingers bled. Im so grateful to have someone who's skilled at masonry available because my skills are more in the "organize the tools, purchase the supplies" category.

However. I am the only one who is short enough to crawl inside the chimney and rebuild the bricks, attaching them to the new base that was built out of cinderblocks. So i did that. And learned how to tuckpoint (i think it's called that) which will be very useful later when I want to redo the living room fireplace.

But have I mentioned im claustrophobic? Also I was extremely nervous about the 3 stories of rickety chimney above me falling down (it was fine, nothing fell). And by the way i saw at least 3 spiders that i couldn't identify because it was too dark. (We have black widows here. They could have been widows. Dunno.) And I couldn't wear headphones to calm my autism down, because this was a circumstance that required full situational awareness. Basically the worst day ever.

But it's over! Tomorrow I have to finish the last section of bricks and mortar replacement but I can do it by lying on my stomach on the first floor hearth and reaching down, so it will be much less of a sensory nightmare.

Wish me luck! If you feel like helping (some of you have already asked) my next step after this is to call a chimney guy and ask them to give me a new quote based on the fact that I've now had a real honest to God masonry stabilization of the part that was dangerous; now I need a chimney guy to do things like work on the upper part and cap the chimney. So that's not gonna be cheap, and if you feel in a gifty mood, all tips will DEFINITELY be going to the chimney repairs. 😆 but I do have more frivolous things on my Amazon wishlist if you find tipping to be less interesting. Never required, but always appreciated!

Im going to bed now because I have to get up in the morning and do masonry. Thanks for being so awesome. You guys are my favorite part of my life. I just get to do what I like for a living, and have a flexible enough schedule to drop everything when a chimney emergency comes up. I appreciate you!