2/22-24/11 I went up to Camp Serendipity for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

I left earlier than usual but at about milepost 34 I was stopped for 45 minutes while they cleared a jack-knifed semi a couple miles ahead. The roads were covered with compact snow and ice so I switched to 4WD while I was waiting. Once we got going, the going was slow. I didn't get up to 30 MPH all the way over the pass and most of the time I was going less than 25 MPH. It was beautiful driving though with new snow all over the trees.

I arrived at 1:00. There was about 8 inches of new snow on the ground and the driveway hadn't been plowed. I had no trouble driving in and parking. After moving in and having lunch, I went to work cutting away the last of the OSB from around the chimney pipe at the roof. I called the building department and scheduled an inspection for the next day. Before I quit for the day I got a start on cleaning up the sawdust mess.

On Wednesday I started out by cleaning the mortar off the hearth. I found that a floor scraper was just the right tool for the purpose. The blade slid smoothly over the polished marble surface without scratching it, but where there was mortar on top, the blade just went under it and scraped it loose. I had to sharpen the blades a few times, but it got the job done rather nicely if I say so myself.

It snowed lightly on and off most of the day, but only a couple additional inches accumulated. Since I wasn't planning to make another mess soon, I decided to clean the place really good. I started by vacuuming the loft. I had just about finished when Craig from the building department showed up.

He approved the chimney clearance and I showed him my plan for moving the stove to get the clearance there. Then we talked for quite a while about the handrails/guardrails for the loft stairs. He explained the required clearances and the options for fastening the pickets. It would be OK to have the pickets encroach into the required 3-foot tread span, but only at the bottom and below the rails. You still need the full 3 feet above the rails.

I still didn't want to eat into the tread span even at the bottom so I favored the idea of making a 90 degree bend in the bottoms of the rebar pickets and embed them into the end grain of the treads. This would place the pickets on the outsides of the treads and present only a small obscuring of the end grain. Later, when I thought about it some more, it occurred to me that it would be better to bend the rebar only 45 degrees and drill the holes down at a 45 into the treads. This would allow the rebar to emerge from the end of the tread right up against the top edge and obscure only a small amount of the end grain. I think it would also make a stronger anchor for the pickets.

The biggest problem, though, was the knuckle-clearance required for handrails. He told me about the bread-loaf type of combination guardrail and handrail. It's called that because in cross section it looks like a slice of bread. The problem is that you need an inch and a half clearance around the handrail for knuckles, and in my case, on one side, there is the loft floor which comes right out to the plane of the handrail. I could encroach on the 3-feet enough to get the clearance but I don't want to do that. The alternative that we came up with was to cut the loft floor back a few inches. It would be fairly easy to do. I have a piece of TJI to make the new joist, but it will require some work re-seating one or maybe two posts in the loft. That work needs to be done before drywall, so it sort of moved up to a high priority. I planned to start on it next week.

Before he left, Craig gave me a couple of to-dos. He wants to take the plumber's certification with him but he said I could copy it first and then give it to him on his next visit. He also said he needs to get Tom's PE stamp on the engineering work he did for the staircase. He said Tom can fax a stamped copy of the specs directly to the building department. I need to find out that fax number and call Tom and ask him to do it.

After Craig left, I vacuumed the first floor, had lunch, and took a nap.

The afternoon was devoted to moving the stove. I started by moving the scaffold tower so that the planks were aligned in the direction the stove had to move. Then I arranged the planks on the first and second tiers so they ran right alongside the stovepipe on both sides.

Next, I clamped a couple 1x2s crosswise to the planks on the second tier on both sides of the stovepipe. These, together with the planks would hold the stovepipe in this position after it was unhooked.

Then I tied a small rope around the stovepipe and ran it up to a come-along hanging from one of the crosswise 1x2s. And then I took the screws out of the slip joint in the stovepipe which I could reach from the top tier planks. I flexed the pipe to prove that it would slip up and down in the slip joint. It was pretty stiff, probably from creosote, but it did slip.

Then by cranking on the come-along, the pipe lifted up out of the stove. It is not screwed to the stove at that joint. As soon as I could see that I could lift it up into the slip joint, I let it back down. What I wanted to do was to take the bottom section of stovepipe completely off so I could see if I could fix the damper. The damper was off-center and so it would end up closing all by itself. I had "fixed" the problem by hanging a stiff copper wire counterbalance on the handle which would keep the damper open.

Since I needed to remove the stovepipe to move the stove anyway, I figured this was the time to fix the damper properly. I thought I had installed it improperly by running the axle through it missing the last loop in the cast-iron damper. When I got the section of pipe loose and examined it with a flashlight, I realized that the last loop was actually broken. I wouldn't be able to fix it without replacing the damper altogether. That would mean that I couldn't finish moving the stove and hooking it back up until next week. Instead I decided to live with the copper wire counterbalance and put the pipe back together again.

Next I went up to the highest scaffold plank and removed the four screws holding the stovepipe to the chimney. With these removed, I was able to pull the pipe down away from the chimney with the slip joint taking up the slack. I cranked the come-along again and pulled the entire stovepipe up and out of the stove. The stove was now free to be moved across the hearth and the full stovepipe was loose and just hanging from the rope.

I used a small board to lever each side of the stove up in turn so I could slide a plastic coated piece of particle board under each end of the stove. Then I connected a loop of rope around the stove to a come-along which was anchored to the bottom of the Grid D2 PSL. I took a picture of me cranking the come-along as I pulled the stove over the 16 inches to its new spot. Then I reversed the levering procedure and removed the plastic coated boards.

Next, up on the second scaffold tier, I unclamped the crosswise 1x2s and slid them and the stovepipe 16 inches to line it up with the stove. Then using the come-along, I lowered the stovepipe back into the stove.

Through another stroke of serendipity, I found that when I rotated the stovepipe, the jog in the top of the pipe that was needed to reach the chimney before worked almost perfectly to reach it again. It was about a quarter of an inch off, but by twisting a couple sections of the elbow joints just a little, I got it to line up perfectly.

It took a little ingenuity to rig up a lever system using a couple of 1x2s to lift the elbow section of the stovepipe up out of the slip joint so it would mate with the chimney, but when I did, it worked well and held it in place until I could get a screw in to hold the joint. I had to drill a new hole but that wasn't much of a problem.

The next two screws were more difficult because from that rickety platform and with the scaffold tower where it was, I had trouble reaching them with the drill. But I got two more screws fastened.

The fourth screw was impossible. Or at least it would have been so dangerous to try that I decided that three screws would be enough and called the job done. I was very happy to have that job done. There were a lot of parts of it that I wasn't sure how I was going to do it, from cutting the marble to reconfiguring the stovepipe, but now it was done and I was happy.

On Thursday morning it was 22 degrees outside and there had been an additional 2 inches or so of snow. The idea of that fourth screw had nagged at me during the night, so after breakfast, I bit the bullet and moved the scaffold tower again so I could reach the other side of the chimney. I got a different bit that turned out to be a lot sharper so it was a lot easier drilling the hole. I drove in that fourth screw and felt a lot better about the job.

When I removed the bit from my screwdriver, I noticed that the chuck on my Makita cordless drill was messed up. One of the three grabbers in the chuck stuck out further than the other two. It's always something.

With the job done, I went to work and dismantled the entire scaffold tower. I temporarily stored the frames, braces, and planks out on the front porch. I'll take them down to the crawlspace when I have more time and energy. While I was getting my gear ready to leave for home, it dawned on me that I had forgotten to replace the four screws in the slip joint. I rationalized and decided that there was plenty of strength in those four screws in the chimney to hold up the elbow section down to the slip joint. Furthermore, there was quite a bit of friction in the joint itself to help hold it up. Still, I'll keep an eye on the pipe to see if it starts to draw out of plumb. If it stays put, I'll wait until I put the ceiling boards on and then I can install those four screws. I think it will be all right until then. I took a picture of the stove in its new location before I left for home at 11:45.

2/26/11 Sunday. I woke up realizing that even though I need two guardrails on the staircase, I only need one handrail. That can be on the side away from the loft floor, so I don't have to move the floor back after all. I'll double check with the building department, but I am pretty sure that's the rule. What a relief.