Of Roof Tiles & Snowdrops

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Made a tentative start on the stove installation today. I've done a lot of sketching and visualizing over the weeks, rehearsing the moves in my head, a bit like climbing or dancing, I guess; but at the end of the day, one has to get stuck in to some actual, physical investigation, and dare I say it, work. So, with the aid of a borrowed roof-ladder and my collection of slating tools, I set off up the roof to find out exactly where the living-room flue issues forth beneath the slates. Except that it doesn't in any convenient sense: the chimney stack must have straddled next door's cottage originally, and so I will have to go in from the side (in the tiny loft space) to open up the flue enough to feed the chimney liner in, and terminate to the register plate where the insulated flue - with a suitable offset to exit the roof - will be sited.

I think the outside work should be trivial, if hard - at my age at least - work, but the inside stuff will be a pain, I think quite literally, due to the restricted space: around a metre's headroom. There's still a lot of mental rehearsal and side-chain mental processing going on, but it will get done: I'm just a little rusty on the building-work side of things, these days. I've had plenty of offers of help and advice, which I'm certain I'll draw on as the thing progresses, but I think, aside from the lack of physical shape and the relative lack of self-confidence, I'll get it done. I've done far bigger and harder things in the past. I'll keep you posted. Oh, and the snowdrops? Couldn't resist it: they were growing in a small, isolated clump, a couple of metres back from my ladder. Far prettier than what I was doing, so there we go...

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