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11/10/2006: "The Quest for the Woodstove: Part Three"

The whole woodstove project reminds me of a comedic song my friend Jon uncovered, called "Right Said Fred." In the song, two men are trying to move some large, unspecified object into a house, and they encounter a host of problems. Finally, it comes down to this:

[Right Said Fred, by Bernard Cribbins]

"Right" said Fred, "both of us together, one each end and steady as we go".
Tried to to shift it, couldn't even lift it, 
We was getting nowhere
And so, we, had a cup of tea....

"Right" said Fred, "give a shout to Charlie", up comes Charlie from the floor below.
After straining, heaving and complaining, 
We was getting nowhere
And so, we, had a cup of tea....

Charlie had a think and he thought we ought to take off all the handles
And the things what held the candles, but it did no good, 
Well I never thought it would.

"All right" said Fred, "have to take the feet off, 
to get them feet off wouldn't take a mo." (moment)
Took its feet off, even with the seat off, should've got us somewhere but no
So Fred said "let's have another cup of tea" and we said "right-o".

"All right" said Fred, "have to take the door off, need more space to shift the so and so."
Had bad twinges taking off the hinges, and it got us nowhere
And so, we, had a cup of tea....

"Right" said Fred, "have to take the wall down, that there wall is going to have to go".
Took the wall down,  even with it all down, we was getting nowhere
And so, we, had a cup of tea....

Charlie had a think and and he said "look Fred, I've got a sort of feeling
If we remove the ceiling, with a rope or two we can  drop the blighter through".

"All right" said Fred, climbing up a ladder, with his crowbar gave a mighty blow
Was he in trouble, half a ton of rubble, landed on the top of his dome
So Charlie and me had another cup of tea and then we went home."

To get a sense of this lovely song, you can click on the play icon in the graphic below, which will result in the playback of a fragment of "Right Said Fred" as recorded by David Jones:

I've got a sort of feeling, if we remove the ceiling... we'll find some clarity, at least, about where to route the wood stove flue. After Nate and Channa and Chris's heroic efforts of two weeks ago, we thought that we could leave the rest up to the professional chimney cleaner/installer. Well, the nameless installer showed up on the appointed morning, measured the distance between two joists casually, and pronounced the venting project dead in the water for lack of clearance. "You've only got eleven inched between joists, and code requires 12 clear inches," he pronounced. Well, he was right, and he was wrong: code does require twelve clear inches, but as it turns out the eleven inch joist spacing was an anomaly. Most of the joists above the kitchen are 16 inches apart.

I had come down to The Farm equipped with a section of joist-sized wood to "sister-up" the existing joist by pairing it next to the joist that was too close to its brethren; we would then cut out a section of the offending joist, and have a large enough opening. However, I had come to doubt everything that the chimney installer had previously told (after his initial five-minute inspection of the premises two months before apparently did not include a joist measurement). However, it is damn tricky to make measurements on one floor, and transfer them upstairs. You have to measure from your desired point to a wall that goes upstairs. In my case I had to measure from the joist to the doorway; from the doorway to the trim to the wall on the other side of the doorway; to the stair trim; to the stair wall; up the stairs to the hall wall; from the hall wall into the bedroom... only to find out that the vent as he envisioned it was not going to come up in the bedroom, as planned, but rather in the upstairs hall landing!

Here I am starting the measurement process; notice that per standard operating procedure we have already commenced cutting(!):


OK, so now we're thoroughly rattled: how the heck is this going to work? The chimney installer told us that we could bring the pipe up into the bedroom by just removing a section of built-in shelving; suppose he was wrong about that, too? So I called the Beaverton firm that sold me the vent pipe. "What is the required clearance for the black pipe that goes from the stove to the first ceiling box? You're kidding?! Eight inches?!" I questioned him thoroughly on this: how can it be eight inches? It just is.

We huddle: OK, we can live with it if we put a tile heat shield up in the kitchen to protect the wall. But getting the vent pipe up through the bedroom is out of the question; we can't get eight inches of clearance relative to the the kitchen cabinets. So, by luck and not design, the joist opening selected by the chimney installer IS the only one that we can use.

So, we open up a small test hole where the vent pipe will go, and a larger opening adjacent to install the sister joist. Now we find out that the joist I pre-cut in Portland is just a little too tall to fit in the space. So, we have to rip a five foot board with a Skil saw... never a fun job. To make it possible to do safely, we screw the board down to the deck outside, and I rip a quarter inch off it. Inside the kitchen, we measure for length, and I trim to length while Nate steadies the board:


Now we try and get the sister joist installed; I had thought that screws would be the better way to go, since it is difficult to find room to swing a hammer between the joists. However, screws would go through the new joist wood, hit the old joist, and fail to pull the boards together. The old joist was too damn hard. I pulled the screws out, and Nate scrounged some 16 penny nails out of the barn. Bam, bam, bam: now the nails were bending when they hit the old joist. Cursing, swearing, and sweating, I pound the nails in as best I can. When I get tired of cursing, swearing, sweating and pounding I jam some screws in the remaining holes, and ram them home with the DeWalt. The house may fall down in an earthquake someday, but that joist is going to be intact.

To test our sense of measurement, we decide to drill a test hole from where we think the vent should come out upstairs. We drill the hole, and then troop downstairs to look for it:


Luckily, the hole comes out only about an inch and a half from where we expected. However, we're still doubtful about the eight inches. Rather than do something stupid while in a state of exhaustion, we quit for the day. I took pictures of the all vent pipe boxes, and when I get home I look up the components in the manufacturer's on-line catalog. It turns out that our black pipe has six-inch clearance requirements:


From this I conclude that the doofus quotient of the local woodstove industry is pretty high.