42: Building Fires

It's cold in Chicago this week. Usually that's not something unusual to say at the dead end of February, but it's been a mild winter this year. Gray and dreary, certainly, but warm enough that I've lost count of the number of times I've been able to take out the trash without bundling up first. This week has been different; this week felt bitter every time I went outside. This week is also different because we finally have a functioning fireplace.

Technically we've had a fireplace for over a year. It was one of the reasons we bought the house; we walked in the door and saw the hulking fireplace taking up most of the exterior wall in the front room, and we started dreaming. The house inspector told us we'd need to get the chimney tuckpointed. Every tuckpointer we called to give us an estimate told us that we needed to rebuild the chimney instead. They could fix the masonry, they explained, but the chimney had a lean and would need to be rebuilt within the year anyway. We rebuilt the chimney from the roofline up, then called a chimney cleaner.

The chimney cleaner gave us more bad news. There had been multiple fires inside the chimney in the past, and the liner was badly damaged. It couldn't be cleaned, only replaced. When the cleaners inspected the smoke chamber above the fireplace they pulled out a cinder the size of my fist. We had the liner replaced. By then it was spring–too warm outside to light a fire. We lit the grill out back instead. We bought half a cord of wood and stacked it, waiting for colder weather to return.

When fall came we tried lighting a fire in the fireplace, and we smoked ourselves out of the house instead. We didn't know how to build a proper fire; we'd never done it before. The chimney flue was very small. It couldn't maintain a proper draft, so the logs wouldn't light properly. They just smoked, until our eyes streamed and we had to throw open the windows and give up once more.

It turns out our fireplace–which is original to the house–had been built to burn coal instead of wood. We live in a Chicago bungalow; the entire house is compact. I've grown used to complaining about the strange choices that the previous owners had made when they maintained the house, but it turns out that the fireplace was designed to be small and efficient. It isn't a standard size compared to modern fireplaces because it didn't need to be. It fits the side wall of our front room, and it throws out heat when it's in use. It's practical. It just needed to be retrofitted. We added a fan to the top of the chimney to generate a better draft. The fan's ugly, but it works. The fireplace doesn't smoke any more.

I'm learning how to build fires now. I like to think I'm getting pretty good at it, but most of my success comes from strategically placed firestarters and a willingness to flip over burning logs whenever they start to die. The bulbs are starting to come up all around our neighborhood, but, a little selfishly, I hope the cold sticks around a little longer. It's been cozy for the last week from where I sit.

What I wrote:

For paying subscribers, I had a few thoughts about going to repertory screenings, and the different kinds of audience laughter that I've encountered there.

What I talked about:

On the latest episode of Seeing and Believing podcast, Kevin and I reviewed Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. We paired it with a Watchlist review of the 2014 Tom Cruise/Emily Blunt sci-fi action movie Edge of Tomorrow.