Let me just say that Mother Nature is not a friend to home renovations. I won’t start on having a house in a flood zone, that’s being reserved for another post!
January in New England is brutally unpredictable. Unlike February (we know it’s awful), in January you may get 40 degrees or you may get 4. This past week has been a great example of this. On Saturday, the forecast was 10″ of snow for Tuesday. On Sunday, the forecast was 20″. On Monday, the earth was predicted to collapse on itself and mankind would end as we know it, according to the weather weenies. Grocery stores were attacked, road rage…er..raged and we all prepared for Armageddon. Tuesday came and we got 6″ of snow.
Why am I rambling on about this? Well, during this week, we were scheduled to take our chimney down on our current project at Hawkins Ave. After plowing for many miles/hours, my mason, John Faucher showed up to start dismantling the 130 year old chimney. After some exploratory surgery in the attic, he went to get some ladders.
(yes the entire upper chimney is balanced on 1 brick!)
Well, long story short, the roof was too icy to get up to demolish the exterior portion of the chimney. The snow had prevented us from setting up scaffolding along the house and the icy roof was preventing us from getting a ladder up to the upper part of the roof.
I’m getting worried about this because more snow and wind were forecast and I had HVAC contractors scheduled along with potential buyers wanting to see the project.
John gets on the phone after burning up some brain cells and calls a buddy of his that owns a tree trimming service. The next morning Robert with Hutchinson Tree (HutchTree.com) shows up with a brand new $140,000, 75′ bucket truck (only second job it had ever been to). Turns out, John had never used a bucket truck ever despite removing dozens of chimneys in his career. Turns out, Robert had never removed a chimney before. The combination worked out great!
The chimney was so bad that Robert didn’t even need a hammer for most of the job! It only took about 30′ to drop the chimney down it’s own flue inside where guys carried it down to the dump truck. It’s actually a miracle that the chimney hadn’t fallen in the last couple decades.
So the moral of the story is that old houses are unpredictable along with Ma Nature and there is no book that can teach you everything. Sometimes you have to sit back, scratch your head and figure it out. Both John and Robert commented that they had just discovered a new niche in both of their business models.
You can see some short videos of the whole process at our Huthmaker Homes YouTube channel.