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Monday, November 28, 2005
Hey Ben, what you been up to?
Well...
We're currently having an almighty struggle with the physics of smoke. We have two fireplaces in our house: one in the lounge and another in the kitchen. The lounge fireplace used to be concealed by a VERY nasty electric fire, but is now home to a wood-burning stove that is so hot we have to keep the doors open to be able to sit in the room. The kitchen fireplace used to be a lot smaller, tiny in fact, and used to be surrounded by HIDEOUS 1960s brown and pink tiles, but is now smartly adorned with a 17th century hob-grate in front of the original blackened stones of the chimney.
The battle we're having is with this hob-grate. No matter what we try, some smoke escapes the chimney and comes out into the room. Actually, when I say some smoke, I really mean most of. I spent last weekend fashioning narrowings for the throat and improvised hoods and managed to get 99% of the smoke to go up. The plan was to get my bodged effort turned into metal and permanently attached. However, a chance visit to our local reclamation yard saw us excitedly trying out an antique fire hood that fitted almost perfectly. A fire was lit and the room promptly filled with smoke. Bugger! After a bit of fiddling about we managed to make it almost work - the flue wasn't tall enough so smoke was escaping out into the cavities of the chimney, cooling, and then coming back down and out into the room. So my mission this week is to get some metal from the blacksmith to extend the flue. Fingers crossed: it's getting bloody cold in the kitchen.
We picked up our kitchen table on Saturday! This is very exciting for us. Since moving in we've been on the look out for an authentic pine kitchen table to give our kitchen that authentic country cottage kitchen feel. Could we find such a thing? Could we f. Everything we found was either too expensive or too small. So we ended up going to a pine shop and getting one made from reclaimed pine. It was a compromise, but we had to get something. However, it turns out we should have done that from the beginning: it's perfect! It looks really nice and makes the room feel like a proper kitchen at last.
I spent a bit of time on Sunday finishing off a couple of new babyhobo t-shirts.
I watched House of Flying Daggers yesterday which is a beautiful film, but a little unbalanced: lots of time is spent on scenes that have little impact on the plot but that look nice, and little time is spent on important scenes that are perhaps not as visual. But it's good.
So what about you? Get up to anything interesting?
.....posted at 10:36 am permalink
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