As with all houses in France the chimney must be cleaned every year and a certificate issued if you are going to live in the property or your house insurance isn’t valid. Well our house had been empty now for some 5 years and after failing miserably to get hold of a chimney sweeper local or otherwise it was time to be brave and do it ourselves.

One old heavy stove!

The first issue we had is that the wood burning stove you see in the pictures was almost built into the chimney heat guard. This guard had been made some years ago out of what at best was tin and we knew from the little we could see there was some sort of fire blanket decaying above it and best guess was that when we removed this a lot of soot, coke and toxic blanket would be coming down.

There was no way we could clean the chimney through the flume pipe to everything had to be moved. This was going to get messy.

Geared up with goggles, respirator, gloves and a whole lot of pure grunt we started moving the stove which not only seemed to be made out of cast iron but also welded to the floor through years of no use (we’ll come back to this later) .

It’s worth mentioning at this time that it was April and 10pm at night and it was almost freezing so it’s in our best interest to get this sorted and the heat working if we can.

Now we can begin

We finally managed to get the stove away from the wall with the flume mostly intact which was a good start. This thing had to weight over 80Kilos so we made slow progress getting it across the floor to where we could then start on the chimney.

Now it was time for the chimney guard / heat reflector to come down and this was going to be messy. As we started to peel the corners off the tin guard it was only then you noticed the amount of corrosion on the thing and it started coming off in strips, there was just no way this was going to come down either in one piece or in a controlled manner.

So a bit of tugging and manipulation the thing came down in one big chunk with not so much of a crash as a whimper. There was no massive cloud of coke or coal, and the soot was nowhere to be seen. We’d lucked out.

Time to start sweeping

On inspection of the chimney any soot that was in the stack was now solid coke and sending up the chimney brushes only brought down minimal debris, we’d really got lucky here.

Looking like a Stormtrooper

Solid!

While I’d have to replace the heat reflector I wasn’t going to be carrying out bags and bags of soot for days, and the fact we’d not covered the place in black soot was going to really please Dawn.

No we’d made sure the chimney wasn’t going to watch fire we could work on getting the heat sorted from the stove ans seeing as this thing was rusted solid this wasn’t going to be easy… Cold is a great motivator.

Date of Job : April 11 2008 (will add to build diary shortly)