Solving issues

So I thought this post was gonna be about the process for the acid stained concrete floors but what was supposed to be a Monday start turned into a Thursday.  That's tomorrow and we have issues to deal with today.  

So there sits our wood burning stove.  A stove we bought over 40 years ago and have used every single winter.  Love being able to step on the hearth and back up to the lovely heat coming from it.  Unlike a fireplace where you get one side of your body warm at a time this little stove radiates heat all around itself so you get a very nice overall warm feeling.  

But I digress, we have an issue that we need to deal with.  And that is...a few weeks ago our second in charge GC told us that the GC was not going to be installing the stove pipe for this.  Mind you hes known from the beginning that we were putting this in.  And if we had to do it ourselves that is not a problem either except at this stage of the build it is a problem.  Not cool Ronnie, not cool.  

If we had known from the beginning that we were going to be installing it would have been done right after the framing and before the sheetrock and foaming.  Would have been an easy job, half an hour or less and it would have been taken care of.  

See that tiny little black mark to the left of the top of the ladder?  

Yes, that mark right there.  That is the center of where the stove pipe needs to hit.  And the pipe is centered into a transition box that protects all the surrounding sheetrock and framing and foam from the heat going up the flue.  And it's also centered EXACTLY between 2 rafters.  It's got to be exact.  

We found this spot by taking a measurement from the stove and marking an X on the hearth.  Then we dropped a plumbob from the ceiling down and moved it till it was directly over that X.

This is a plumbob.  It's an old tool but so useful.  Filled with lead and used in various applications but theres nothing else that will do the job.  

This is the space we are working in.

You can see, it's not spacious and in the last picture..

That short 2 x 4 that's on the left...that is EXACTLY where we need to be.  The 2 x 4 is scabbed onto the rafter and all we can figure is that it's where some sheetrock fell funny and had to have extra screws.  

Bob has figured out that just the very end of that board needs to come off and we will be silver...not golden yet cause job isn't done. 

Plumbob was dropped. Center was marked the the transition box was measured ( twice) just to be absolutely sure.  Then 4 corner holes were drilled.

This is my dad's old dremel tool.  Bob and my dad had a mutual admiration society going for each other in figuring out ways to fix things.  He and my dad once consulted each other for weeks about tubing my dad needed to use to build an air powered air brake system for one of the model airplanes he was building.  But I digress.  He used this to cut off just an inch of that scabbed 2 x 4 without cutting unnecessarily into the sheetrock.

There are the 4 holes he will use as his guide.

And here he has started his first cut.

Success!  Hip, hip horay!  It's done.  Just a very small amount of the paper torn but the trim piece for the box will cover that.  Now to go from the top up thru the roof.  But that's for another day.  We need to order stove pipe in order to get our alignment correct.