first a rant – i am loosing patience with tumblr, its slow, its down half the time, and the queue feature simply cannot handle more than one timed request. it simply publishes al your posts. we were on vacation for a week, but no one would have noticed if tumblr didn’t screw up. ugh. any expert out there on how to switch content to blogspot or wordpress?

now.

for all my huffing and puffing about wanting my estimate now, we decided to put the fireplace off. no roasting chestnuts for us.

that of course meant that it had to be cleaned up and insulated – giant holes in the house no good for winter (or any time really).

it doesn’t look pretty but we had no choice — sergey patched/covered the hole in the floor of fireplace (original probably was either removed or rusted through) and another one leading to the roof with cardboard and insulation foam. it works.

to cover the ugly, i used another piece of cardboard, spray painted it black:

and inserted it over the first piece. not perfect, but much better: