Stripping Down

A big, big project went down while I was on vacation in March/April 2019–the chimney got stripped.

You’re probably scratching your head at that statement, so let me illustrate. Below is the central chimney column in the great room. First, a shot of the space before we bought the house; then right after moving in; and a third from the downstairs area.

What do you notice about it? Probably that the chimney column is very noticeable. It’s a giant off-white pillar in a very spacious space. This is because the POs painted it, for reasons known only to them. And like most of the work they did (mainly to sell the house), the job was done in a half-assed manner. Just three years after we moved in, the paint was flaking and beginning to peel. Since we already had giant white splotches on the walls where furnace vents once were, new molding installed as part of the floor refinishing project, and staples galore across the beams separating the upper and lower sections of the structure, we decided “what’s one more mess in that space? Why not paint the walls a color other than urine?”

I called my favorite house painter and asked if he was interested in the job, and he was, so during the month I was gone, he spent several days making the pillar not an eyesore. The work involved scaffolding and sealing off things a bit–while most of the work was done by a chemical agent, there was some dust kicked up.

In addition to removing paint, the team also patched the super-awful trench-like holes in the closet created by the electricians when I had the switches outside my office revamped.

And to top it all off–literally–Agent Smith made use of a dry day to set up conduit on the roof and side of the great room building for directional antennae wiring that provides our network connectivity to the outside world. This means we no longer hear a loose cable slapping against the roof when the wind blows, a very nice, subtle improvement.