Boy, what a night....and day this has been. It started last night, the wood stove would not burn at all, it had hot embers in it, but suddenly just stopped burning, and smoke would seep out the door. Good Grief Charlie Brown ! I opened the draft to let the air in, but it made it worse, it continued to smoke. By the time Benny got home from work, it was getting worse. Nothing helped, we have had this stove for several years and clean the flu pipe out every year, so figured creosote had to have fallen down inside and stopped it up or something. We decided to do without heat for the night and let the stove cool down till morning, we would take any wood that had partially burned and put it in the fireplace insert heater we have in another room. This is a huge old house, two houses put together, plus another big room built on years later. This morning the fun began...........Benny wanted to take the flu down, but I wanted to call the company and see how we could access the inside of it to clean it out....luckily the stove pipe would not budge, period !!...so he made two calls and thirty minutes later, we started to take the inside of the wood stove apart. It seems there is a huge, flat metal plate that fits inside at the top. You have to lift up, tilt it back, and just keep working it to try to get it to come loose. Fun....sooty, messy, straining...Benny could only get one side undone, and I finally told him we would have to remove the firebricks. We pulled out the fire bricks from the back, still could not get it loose, so took the side fire bricks loose as well, and it came down. We then found it had a little slit, about an inch wide and  10 inches or so long that you could see creosote in it, above where we pulled the flat piece loose,  so between kitchen utensils, a screwdriver, and finally a hose attached to my old vaccum cleaner, we got a lot of it out. I told Benny I wanted him to go up on the roof, get the long wire brush, and clean out the stove pipe. I could see no sense in going through this again...so he did...and more fell down and I managed to get it pulled out. Then came the cleaning of the inside of the wood stove...Oh Joy !! ..Benny was completely give out, so I knew I would have to finish the job...Well, me and the Good Lord...I really talked His ear off this morning...and Benny stood there dumbfounded as I lifted that heavy metal piece and managed to hook it back under the top of the stove. I had Super Help, I knew I could do it ! I did have a problem putting back one of the fire bricks, I had to do it over and over until I got them all in place again. Then the stove was cleaned inside again, the window was clean, and Benny finished by cleaning off the top of the stove. I hope I do not ever have to go through all this again. Maybe someone will be able to fix their's through all our efforts. It was a job, but it is done. I think I could do it again if I had to....I sometimes envy those who just turn on a thermostat and it is warm. Tonight, the logs are burning cheerfully...a lesson learned. I always take these bad times as days the Good Lord sends me a message....we could have had a flu fire or something worse, so we managed to avert it. Well, the  phone just rang, seems the renter's water heater is leaking....The Lord has such a sense of humor where I am concerned...tomorrow another problem needs to be worked on, so I may as well get ready to face it.........

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