Somewhere it sates that a wood burning stove is charming and romantic. Maybe it is, but it ended up being a lot more effort than I ever expected to take on.
It started well before the plans were submitted to the city for the new house. A local fireplace shop was having a moving sale, so we could pick up a deal on a wood burning stove, right?….
So April of 2018 we were new owners of a Morso 6148 (we didn’t break ground on the new house until Jan of 2019).
So construction happened while the Morso sat in a safe space in the garage. Once most of the framing was in place, Amy was ready to bring the fireplace shop onsite as they also do installs! Great! So as I’m attending to my 2.5 year old, I have to meet the guys at the job to look over the work. They looked it over and I wasn’t too happy to be the dumb ass to answer the questions on the status of this build. I text Amy as follows.
So begins the adventure, but first lets review what we have gone through for the first three months. We have had rain just about every week, the contractor is tracking in mud on everything, the sub floor has been flooded, getting ripped off my the framing contractor, the laboring crew are a bunch of hacks, the plans are not complete or wrong, and I’m here trying to manage this and really have no idea what I’m doing. SO cry me a river you say. You’re right, just after I spend 6 month in counseling, let us move on.
So the Morso 6148 has a 6″ chimney pipe exhaust. I suppose that is what the manual says. The photo below is the opening into the chimney chase from the living room and travelling up two stories. It looks like roughly a 6″ square opening.
So if you read the text message, in the worst case we would need 18″ of clearance, or if some sheet metal was used, we could reduce this to 6″ of clearance. Well we don’t have any clearance present (or much worth talking about). Even if you took out the two horizontal 2×6 lumber pieces that frame the opening, there is balloon framing the entire length of the chase that is within the 6″ of clearance. So basically, the entire chase needs to be rebuilt. How was it built in the first place? It was built on the ground, equating to roughly 20′ in length. One end was strapped to a crane forklift which moved it into place (mind you, in doing so the crane forklift crushed portions of the concrete driveway…), lifted it upright, and installed. Which it is wrong and has no allowable clearance for the chimney flue! So was the contractor at fault here? Nope, not really. There was no specific plan details on how to build the chimney chase other than some small items from the structural engineer.
The error fully lands on the architect and the general contractor, which we are both.
Amy is mainly interested in finding a mason contractor for the brick work. For me, I’m slowly developing a view that I’m in this by myself. She speaks to one brick guy that was recommended, he says he may know someone who could work on the chase. He walks away and doesn’t call back. Two more mason contractors come by, one is willing to quote the other brick work, but not the chimney as the chase rework isn’t defined. The third walks the site and spends plenty of time talking the good talk and states he needs to run off to a dinner engagement and would come back and measure for quotation, he never returns.
Efforts to work the chase also go flat. We don’t want to work with our existing framing contractor who we simply want off the job. We try to pull in a previous contractor we have work with before, but he can’t make the time.
I begin to do my own research on how to accomplish this task along with laying the brick, because nothing is panning out.
