Back in January, I commented on the Leaning Stack of Surbiton, an iconic landmark that unfortunately had a limited shelf life.
Sometime over the past 124 years, the chimney had seen some movement and developed an inward lean. Also, probably due to this, it was shortened by a few courses of bricks.
The movement was fine as it had stopped but upon building up the gable, it was realised that the height was too low and would be below the roofline. Proposal 1 was to remove it altogether - which would have been much cheaper but would lose the wood burning fire that we enjoy so much on movie nights (which has been consistently every Friday since Covid started). So that wasn't really an option.
The other option was to completely rebuild the chimney alongside the gable end wall. Good thing we were doing this as the incremental cost was much lower and the end product will be completely flush with the wall.
Happy days .. except ...
The roof liner was about 60 cm too short now.
Initially I didn't think this was a problem .. maybe stretch it a bit, maybe get an extension. But enter HETAS which basically forbid this - not sure why other than to ensure their installers can make a bit more £££. Anyway it's for fires and I definitely didn't want the liability of trying to go against any regs.
So once the chimney was finished and the pot reinstalled (which looked great), I was on the phone to try and get a new liner. For those who have done this, you'll know this is not cheap. I was a bit ticked at all of this since the liner was less than 4 years old ... grumble.
To save a bit of £££, I agree with the installer that I would remove the old liner. This was a piece of cake and saved me about £200 on the install. I initially thought I'd lift it from the top to avoid mess but gravity had other plans. Liners do get rigid over time and are pretty heavy so this wasn't happening.
Plan B was to take it out the bottom - much easier in the end. I put a bag over the end to limit the soot falling down and coverings on the floors to keep the mess down there and just dragged it out.
So new cap, new liner, new chimney.
And the fire is once again back on.
So it wasn't a cheap venture .. the additional 60cm essentially cost us about £1,500. Talk about burning money. But it was definitely worth doing.
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