My Saturday project was to demolish the chimney. After climbing up on the roof early in the morning to assess my task for the day, I carefully climbed right back down and told Leah that I wasn't sure that being up on the roof and dismantling the chimney was the best idea. I didn't have the best feeling about doing it, but also knew that it had to be done. I sucked it up and started with the concrete chimney cap and weather vane. Luckily I was able to break the cap in two pieces and threw one of them off the roof (making sure Leah and the dogs were inside) and was then stuck with figuring out how to get the weather vane down in one piece. I brought some rope up with me and figured that I would lower the weather vane down to safety along with the chunk of concrete is was attached to. Once the chimney cap was off, bricks started coming down very quickly. There were about 4 or 5 courses of brick above the roof and they all crumbled apart, making for quick work.
Once I was below the roof line, I moved onto the extension ladder where I felt much more stable.
The bricks came down pretty easily until I got to the area that was below the (former) garage roof. The mortar holding the bricks was in much better shape and it made it more difficult to remove the bricks as I got lower. Not to mention, I hadn't eaten lunch and was getting pretty tired after being up on the ladder for the entire morning.
After lunch, I lost all motivation to finish this project and tried to think of an easier way to knock down the rest of the chimney...
Here is what I came up with..
It obviously did not work like I thought it would and I decided that the remaining bricks would have to be taken down by the backhoe that was coming in the morning.
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