Chim-Chim! Cheroo! in anticlimatic

I’ve been slowly dismantling my chimney since early July, which runs up the side of my particularly tall house, through the soffit, and up over the western gable- where it has been noticeably crumbling. Took me from the thaw until then just to get the scaffold up. It’s not that I’m a slow worker, or a procrastinator- I’m just terribly afraid of heights. Most of my energy is spent reminding myself not to look down, and then having panic attacks and questioning my life choices when I invariably do. It leaves very little energy for much hammer swinging.

My scaffold topped out at 4 sections, which is approximately 3 stories high. I didn’t have the platforms that one usually uses, so I used a series of planks that I’d slowly walk up to where I wanted them. At the top, the whole tower sways in the breeze- which seems much stronger and more intimidating up there. I started very slow, working one handed, with the other constantly clutching part of the scaffold frame. The bricks are somewhere over 120 years old, and quite crumbly- especially at the top. So it was doable, one handed. I had a roped bucket and a pully rigged up, with a separate smaller rope connected to the bottom of the bucket, so that I could lower a bucket of bricks and tug the secondary rope to dump them out neatly at the bottom of the scaffold before pulling the bucket back up and repeating. At that height I couldn’t lob bricks down, as they tended to bounce and fly in no predictable direction. It worked, and was neat, but it meant dedicating 75% of my energy to bucket detail.

Once I made it down a scaffold story, I felt close enough to the ground to start lobbing them. And so I’ve been doing all weekend, managing to knock half of the thing down in two days. Unfortunately today it was achingly hot, and I had to take many breaks indoors to cool off, otherwise I might have been able to get a lot more. Still, the lower I go the more comfortable I feel being up there swinging a hammer- and also the better I am getting at breaking it up in a controlled and efficient fashion. I really love tasks that accelerate like that the closer they get to completion.

Last updated July 18, 2022