Every spring, my wife and I go up and prepare our cabin to be used.
We spent most of our summer weekends and every day we had off work, in our cabin in the mountains.
My wife and I love to fish, and we passed our love of fishing and hiking down to her children. In the spring, we were up at the cabin and I wanted to clean the chimney. We had a fireplace in the cabin to help keep us warm on the cool nights in early spring and late summer. After seeing the signs of squirrels in the cabin, I knew the flue must have been open all winter long. I was using the brush in the chimney when I realized it didn’t go down to the hearth. I had to go inside the house and push the brush into the chimney from the inside of the cabin. I got down on the fireplace hearth and started pushing the wire brush up into the chimney. My wife had just gotten out that I needed to be careful because there could a lot of dirt up there when the soot came flying down at me. A fine layer of soot was all over the hearth and the floor. What didn’t make it onto the floor and hearth was in my hair on my skin and coated me from the head to toe. I swore this was going to be the last time I cleaned the fireplace chimney. The next time the fireplace chimney needed cleaned, I was going to call one of the local professionals.