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Welcome again to Saturday Morning Home Repair blogging, where we talk about fixing houses and the things in them that are supposed to work for us. An ad hoc cadre of building professionals and gifted amateurs attempt to answer questions that arise from readers, and offer encouragement and advice for those inclined to do things for themselves, if they can. We all do a lot of things, collectively, and can probably help out with insights from our vast experience.
Or sometimes, we just gab.
Hi, everyone.
This week’s offering comes with yet another tale involving previous owner, Mister WTF?!, and this one’s a doozy.
Part one: We were told by our neighbors to the west that one evening, Idiot Boy burned a fire in the wood stove that got so hot that when the fire department arrived, parts of the cast iron stove were actually glowing. This was corroborated by our across the street neighbor who had a friend who was one of the responding fire personnel. I’m not sure what transpired during the rest of that evening other than no one died, and nothing burned down. But, we found out later, just barely on that second part.
Part two: When we moved in, the east and west sides of the house were still covered with those horrid asbestos shingles, which we removed over a the space of a year. The last place to be uncovered was the south east corner of the house. That was when we found out how close the house had come to catching fire on The Night of the Glowing Stove.
I didn’t take pictures with the intention of diarying — this was too long ago, so the pics don’t really tell the story, but you can see in this first picture a bit of the smoke damage that came through the wall, and was hidden under the asbestos. It was much worse down lower where the new siding is. The wood down there actually showed burn marks and charring, sadly I didn’t get a pic of that.
There’s a bit to the right of the chimney, too, up high. Actually, there are number of minorly interesting things in the picture below. The green bottle tells me that it was long enough ago that Henry Wienhards was still making decent Blue Bore ale. I miss that stuff. It only looks like we’re flying a flag in our living room. That’s actually a reflection. Wonder why we had her out. This was 2007, so Bush was still stumbling around choking on pretzels. Must have been more protest than celebration. And finally, that connection box precariously attached to the otherwise-purposeless 4x4 is only there awaiting reattachment to the wall. Took me waaay too long to figure that out.
Anyway, we found a place that had the double-beveled shiplap siding, and His Nibs went to town making it solid again. He’s awful good at that.
Really glad the old place didn’t go up in flames, cuz we sure like it here.
Anyway, thanks for reading this installment of “Woodstoves and Substance Abuse: What Could Go Wrong?”
‘Sup with your projects?