Pipin’ hot

After much delay, the chimney guy came today, two hours late … only to leave again.

The premise? A needed a second person to spot him while he’s up on my roof. Whatever. We all have to be safe, I guess.

Hopefully, it won’t take another three weeks to get him back out here to replace the pipe inside the house and clean up the cap, laden with drippings of creosote, on the roof.

We decided to replace the pipe coming out of the stove. Number one, it looks awful, number two, there’s evidence there’s been a fire inside the pipe, inside the house. That’s what happens when you burn laminated wood in a wood stove. Talk to the previous owner, he’s the moron who did that, not me.

The cap, he said, is in good shape and probably cost a lot of money at one time. The stove inside is another story. He tells me how inefficient it is, blah, blah, blah.  The next statement he came up with wasn’t surprising, he could get me hooked up with a new stove for the price of $3,000 and I could earn a 30 percent tax credit by installing an EPA-approved stove. I laughed. Three-thousand dollars would put windows on the house, or siding outside to cover the damage done by the dogs in the back yard and the damage done by time in the front. For that same amount, I can get a one-car garage built with a concrete pad. I could finish all the inside work or lay down high-quality, red-oak #2 wood floors. A new Mac, I could get a new Mac, but that’s not really a house thing. Lasik, I could get Lasik.

After the parade of $3,000 items in my head, I told him to get in line, there’s lots of people with $3,000 things out there.

What do you want to bet, his next available appointment isn’t for a couple of weeks?