the fireplace debacle

When we moved in to our new house in July, we had a fireplace installed with an extra thing called a heatilator and blowers to push the warm air into the room. When cooler weather finally rolled in, Sam realized that the fireplace was not exactly what he had hoped it would be. He contacted our builder, who put us in touch with the sub-contractor that installed the fireplace. After much back-and-forth calling and leaving messages, meetings with the sub and meetings with our builder, it was decided that they would take out all the extra vents and heatilator and install a wood-burning insert (at no charge to us).

We waited and waited and waited, and finally the week before Christmas our wood-burning stove arrived. The installer came and removed all the vents and heatilator and then realized that he didn't have a certain part that he would need. So this is what our fireplace looked like on Christmas day:

He didn't replace the vents on the bottom because we weren't going to need them anymore and he assumed the part he needed would come quickly. It didn't. He actually just came last week and was able to put in the wood-burning insert. So after a month of a fireplace with missing vents, we finally had a fireplace. This is what it looked like:

Not too bad, right? Certainly unfinished still, but not bad. Oh, the only problem was that we couldn't use it. The guy who had ordered it initially had ordered the wrong vent pipe and had to go back and reorder it. That would take another week. So finally that part came in and the fireplace was now functional. Now the only problem was that where they had set the insert was too close to the brick and we couldn't open or close the damper to the fireplace. Kind of an important thing, so our builder brought in the bricker and had him TEAR DOWN THE HEARTH, brick by brick. It was so sad to watch! So now, our fireplace looks like this:

Lovely, eh? Now we just have to wait until the bricker can come back out, but I'm sure that can't happen for a while as we are in the midst of an ice-storm. At least we can have fires in our fireplace again.

I will say that after all of this, the new insert is SO NICE! We didn't use the heater all day yesterday and the wood-burning stove kept our house at a lovely 70 degrees which is warmer than we set our heater thermostat for!


On a completely unrelated note, Henry is going through a 'cowboy' phase. He insists on wearing a button-up shirt every day, along with jeans, a belt, his boots and hat. He's also trying really hard not to smile too much since he feels that cowboys are serious and they don't smile a lot. The knee pads I can't explain. For some reason they always go with his cowboy outfit--as soon as he comes home from school in the afternoons he puts them on.