Saturday, January 21, 2012

Chimney Rehabilitation

What do you do to modernize a furnace for an old, 80-year old apartment building with radiator heat?  Well, this was my view...

Here's the building in question - a 1927, 16-unit apartment house across the street from me. 
The chimney before restoration.


The first step was to lop off a few rows of bricks from the chimney. 

The second step was to reline the flue with a flexible duct.

Make that two flexible ducts.


Toiling whilst people are enjoying good bar-b-q...


Well, shoot, it's too long.

The good news is that this was all occurring during a warm weekend when none of the tenants needed heat.

The final step is to install a new chimney cap.

Note the two caps for the two separate ducts.  Also note that the satellite dish was unscathed in this process.
Here is the building when it was first built (top left).  This is from the March 6, 1927, edition of the Commercial Appeal.

This old Sanborn Insurance map shows that our building once had a parking garage in its small rear yard.

Saturday, January 7, 2012

The Naughty Squirrel

Recently, I noticed each morning that the soil in my planters had been tilled the night before, sometimes to the point where the pansies were completely unrooted.  With these planters being about 40 feet from the ground, I was at a complete loss on what could be riffling through them.

Poor pansies.

...and then, I saw him!  It was a naughty little squirrel that had been climbing the building to get to my planters!

Here he is about mid-way on the second floor.

And here he is waiting for me to go back inside.  When oak trees start growing in my planters in the spring, I know who to blame.