BrainVacation.com - Build It With Brick

Have you ever had someone ask you how your weekend was, then as you proceeded to tell them, you realized they aren't paying attention to you? In fact, they just wanted you to say "Great! How was your weekend?" so they could tell you how much their weekend sucked.

Anyways, since nobody at work cares to hear about my weekend, I'll tell you, the random internet user who is reading my website. I'll just start off by saying that my mom has been watching HGTV too fucking much. She is driving me crazy with all kinds of home improvement shit. Her latest thing was to get me to replace the rotted 2x4 boards on the corners of her chimney. I got up on the roof two weekends ago to measure the boards, and noticed that most of the siding on the chimney is rotten too. So we went to the hardware store and bought the lumber and siding. I started to replace the outer boards and realized that the plywood boards on the inside were rotten as well. At that point I enlisted my brother's help since he has actually worked in construction. He occasionally works for his friend Mike who owns a sheet metal company.

The following Thursday me and my brother started to tear the chimney apart. Upon removing one of the plywood inner boards we realized something else. We realized that we don't know what the fuck we're doing. Oh, wait! We knew that all along. However, we didn't know that by removing that inner board, we would be damaging the structural integrity of the chimney. In other words, it got very flimsy. My brother decided to call his friend Mike over. Mike came over, laughed at us, then provided a few pointers. The key pointer was don't fuck with the chimney again. It got dark, so I decided to finish it myself on the weekend.

I worked on it some more last weekend. I decided not to replace two of the boards(they weren't THAT bad) because the chimney would have gone sliding off the roof. One of those two boards was the lower support board and the only board that was actually nailed to the roof. All the other boards were nailed to it. Fortunately, I figured that out before it was too late. I got all the plywood and 2x4s up and started on the siding. I now hate siding. You have to use small finish nails with siding. Small nails that bend easily. Small nails that are easy to miss with the hammer. My poor fingers.

I got back up there last week. I finished the siding Wednesday. Thursday I started working on caulking the damn thing. My brother volunteered to help some. Friday I redid the areas that my brother caulked and applied the primer. Saturday I painted it and reshaped the sheet metal cap(beat the shit out of it with a hammer till it looked like it did before). I'm finally finished. It took me three weeks to do something that a professional would have done in one day.

The moral of the story: I would not have had to do this if it was a brick chimney.