I try to do as much as I can myself in our house. Bikes and cars are the only things that we get someone else to look after for us. That combination of oily, cold hands getting trapped in some mechanism on a cold day fills me with dread, so I'm happy to let someone else do it and I'll just go to work to pay for it. But before lighting our fire this Autumn there was a job to be done which I quite fancied: Cleaning the chimney. I love Mary Poppins, but Dick Van Dyke made a meal of cleaning out the chimneys. Now, I know they were early Twentieth century coal-burning fireplaces in London and they did have to dance up and down them, but still.
Anyway, I got myself a set of drain rods and a four inch chimney brush and set to it. I put a dust sheet down, removed the 2 throat plates from our Charnwood Arc stove (which was really easy) and
started inserting the brush and gradually feeding the rods and adding more as it went up. Quite a pile of soot came out, even with us only burning solid dry wood for a winter, but it was all nicely contained inside the stove so that I could just empty it from the tray. Easy peasey. Now all we need is for the weather to get cooler as I'm fed up with all this warmth outside!
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