A clean sweep

Have you checked your hidden cavity lately?

After a wet walk, a warm fire

Lord! Have there ever been so many wet, grey days? There’s been nothing newsworthy about this weather - no especially wild nights of howling wind, or biblical rain, although there were glassy plates of water sheeting across the roads earlier in the week. You had to be careful.

The dog park was churned into mud the consistency of cake batter. We walked the streets twice-daily instead, the dog trotting nimbly in a padded coat with his collar up, his moustache flattened by the wind.

I can’t believe I’ve become the kind of person who walks a dog in a coat. I said this to my mate Bee and she drily replied, “Well, I carry mine in a backpack.” Which was true. She and her dog make it look stylish, though. In fact, I’d like to suggest you don’t know how to live unless you’ve carried a pug-mix on your back in public, its tiny nose poking through a viewing pocket.

Bee’s dog is a happy and well-loved little soul

The streets are atmospheric on these cold, darkening afternoons. There’s an air vent on the side of Karori Mall which moodily belches steam. You have to walk through it. It’s like a scene from a noir film, and the only time Karori ever feels like New York. And you can smell woodfires and count the thin columns of blue smoke rising from neighbouring houses. When you’re raw with cold on a dog walk, it’s cosy to think of lamplit rooms with blazing pot-bellied stoves. It reminded me to book a chimney clean.

You’re supposed to do this every year but apparently hardly anyone listens to chimney sweeps. This is why there are thousands of chimney-fires - stopping short of tragic, fatal house fires and not dramatic enough to make news, but still dangerous enough to scorch rafters or ruin the rooms with smoke. I’m as guilty as the next person, because I last booked Alan four years ago. He couldn’t even remember his visit to the house; he has thousands of clients, is rushed off his feet, will semi-retire next year, because who can stand the traffic?

I can’t tell you how wonderful it is that we still need chimney sweeps. It’s an essential service but also one full of charm - nothing like the dull business of getting your broadband set up, or a heat pump put in.

What happens with a chimney cleaner is, they spread a tarp across your carpet and over the hearth tiles. They take away the grate, leaving your firebox looking vulnerable and small.

They seal the fireplace - Alan uses a large Perspex square, with a slashed hole in the middle - and if they’re diligent like him, they wear a mask. Then they poke a blackened wire brush on a pole through the square and work it upwards into the chimney. The longer the chimney, the longer the brush becomes. It’s like a bendy metal tent pole, and you can add more lengths, simply by screwing on more sections.

Alan kept adding sections to his pole, grunting a little with the effort of the reach. Finally he said, “I’m there. I can feel the clay pot.” Our chimney, he told me, was nine metres long. This tickled me no end, let alone the chimney.

As he worked, skitters of small chunks whistled down and landed in the grate. “I can tell you’ve been burning good wood,” he said, which was flattering. “Dry. There’s isn’t much creosote.” Creosote is what do you don’t want to build up in a chimney.

As he worked, scratching away at bricks nobody will see, he told me some of the weirdest things he’s ever pulled out of a chimney. Towels, pillows and blankets, shoved inside to stop a down-draught and forgotten about; many dead birds; once, a bag of marijuana.

He doesn’t do many open fireplaces, he said, as he eased the brush back down and unsnapped the sections. Mainly wood-burners, although dead birds are still common in those. He took away the Perspex and we considered the tidy pyramid of dislodged grit the brush had brought down. “About a third of a bucket,” he said. “That’s pretty good - often it’s a bucket or more.”

Most of it was old mortar, loosened from the bricks. Some, I suppose, was ash. He went to get a bucket from his van and when I came back, the room was tidy and the fireplace bald and empty. Safe. Later that night we’d light the fire and the flames drew easily and well, leaping high into the chimney.

How our houses can still surprise us! Nine metres! Also, it’s likely the chimney is a double-stack. There’s possibly a boarded-over fireplace upstairs in the main bedroom - another, quite possibly, in our daughter’s room. I learned recently there was even a third chimney that had been dismantled by a previous owner. He repurposed the bricks and used them, prettily, in the garden.

When we moved in, we found a box of neat white lengths of rope - spare sashes for the double-hung windows. We’re about to replace some of these - they’re become swollen shut, or soft with damp - and builders have already torn out the wooden surrounds in the bedrooms. This exposed hidden cavities each side of the windows, where the pendulous counterweights are still hanging. Nobody has disturbed these for nearly 100 years. I wonder about the men who put them in.

When the boards were ripped off and piled in the hallway, I noticed many had looping pencilled writing across them. Mostly these were numerals. But whoever wrote these notes in 1929, may have learned their cursive script in a Victorian schoolroom. I’m telling you - the charm.

It’s now our turn to write a chapter for this house. She’s thundered with our voices and footsteps, absorbed our breath, coughed our woodsmoke, groaned and shifted in heavy weather and wobbled in weak-to-moderate earthquakes in the nearly seven years we’ve lived here. But we’re taking away her diseased parts and returning her to as much splendour as we can afford. She’s been good to us, and we owe her this.

Everyone deserves a clean sweep.

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If you fancy giving your flues a good squeaking, you can do much worse than Alan at Chimney Magic. But be quick - he’s semi-retiring next year and will only service the Hutt valley after that. Don’t tell him I sent you, because he’ll have already forgotten me.

I can’t thank you enough if you’ve signed up recently or pledged a paid subscription if one day I turn these on. You’re wonderful. I’m having a lovely time doing this. Every week I have an appointment to keep. With you. (That said, these school holidays may throw a spanner in the works). Muh-WAH to everyone for being so ENABLING!