Our Fire Fiasco:

Okay, don't worry, it wasn't really a fire fiasco (I was going for alliteration), but rather more of a wood stove fiasco. The story goes thusly:

Last winter, when we first moved into the house we noticed that sometimes the upstairs bedroom, through which the wood stove pipe passes, leaked smoke. Well, we talked to our landlord and she assured us that the pipes are new and had recently been cleaned, so we need only buy some special heat resistant caulking to put around the joints. We did that this past summer.

So this winter has come and we had been thoroughly enjoying our wood stove, although it did seem to smoke up the salita a bit every time we'd open the door to put on a new log! However, the last straw was about two weeks ago when black ooze was discovered seeping from one of the joints in the upstairs bedroom, despite the caulking we'd applied! The whole house smelled like a BBQ. I think this must be the same liquid they use to flavor steaks! We also noticed that smoke was leaking from one of the joints in the pipe downstairs and it was impossible to put wood on the fire without being smoked out of the house.

We stopped lighting the fire.

The trouble with our chimney is that the pipe doesn't go straight out of the roof. In the upstairs bedroom, it makes a right angle and heads out the wall where it makes another 'L' turning upwards. I was sure that in the outside 'L' there had to be a blockage because aside from all the problems in the house, the chimney had been dripping that same black ooze onto the sidewalk outside! Anyone who's visited Spain and knows about what clean-freaks Spaniards are, will understand that having a huge, black, sticky stain outside one's house is quite unacceptable, not to mention the fact that it was splashing up onto the facade of the house (and the neighbor's!). Gross. The whole situation had just gotten completely out of hand, so we call a man to come clean the pipes.

Yesterday he came. Angelines spent the morning helping take apart all the pipes, clean them out and reassemble them all. He wasn't a real "chimney sweep" so to speak, just a handy-man we know and who agreed to do the job. There were no wire brushes involved. Instead, they were stuffing newspapers through the pipes with a broomstick to clean them out...then carrying them to the dumpster and beating them to shake out any leftover soot. :) (There's more than one way to skin a cat!)

I was observing the process, standing by the dumpster, when the man looked up at me, "Have you seen Marry Poppins?," he asked, "This is something like that." :) I agreed, but then told him I wanted to see what kind of a dancer he was... he just smiled. Around 12 o'clock the job was finished and our "chimney sweep" left. We spent the rest of the morning cleaning the floors and re-caulking the pipes just in case.

Last night, we had a roaring fire for the first time in two weeks. It is just in time for the Siberian cold front that the weather man has been warning about all week. Apparently it's wreaking havoc in the rest of Europe. We'll have to see what it does down here on the Mediterranean. Whatever the weather, we've got lots of firewood and now a nice clean woodstove--what a difference!

Chim-chimney, Chim-chimney, Chim chim charoo

We will be warm whate'er the wheather will do!

;)