Home Improvement...Tim Allen style.

So, as an early Christmas present my dad gave me a Lowe's gift card. Thinking myself quite the He-Man, Home Improvement type, I set out to get a set of fake gas logs for my otherwise empty, boring fireplace. Having shopped on these for a few weeks, I knew quickly which I wanted to get, and stopped and picked it up on December 1st. That night as I unpacked the box of goodies, I realized two things:

1) The box did not include everything I was going to need, and
2) The sales person at Lowes was absolutely no help.

The next evening I returned to Lowe's to pick up the hose assembly necessary for attaching the logs to my gas pipe. Upon arriving home I set into the fireplace like a beaver devouring the base of a tree. I don't know why people equate beavers as being industrious and hard working, but none the less, that is the metaphor I'll use. While trying to remove the existing burner from the gas pipe I ran into a slight snafu, after 10 years of heating, cooling, and neglect it had thoroughly fused itself to the gas pipe, leaving me no choice but to remove the 16" gas pipe from the wall.

Now I had created a huge problem. No, no, no, the gas was turned off. However, to replace this pipe, it was going to require testing the connection to make certain it wasn't leaking natural gas into my wall space just waiting for some unforseen ember to, putting it lightly, "really open up the living room". OK, after some consultation with my repertoire of handymen (dad), I tried to see if I could get to the joint from the shutoff valve in my wall. Answer: no. OK. Perhaps from inside the fireplace itself, no.

Grasping for straws, today I went outside, and removed the vent from the side of the chimney, to find that I could access that joint from this orifice. However, it is going to require a mirror, a blade of grass, 2 pieces of Big Red, and a good flashlight. Actually, not the gum or grass, but it still won't be easy.

At this point, I'm convinced my father works as a spy for Lowe's and gave me this gift card in a now obvious plot to cause me to spend good gobs of money at said home improvement warehouse. I'm leaving now to go and get a replacement piece of pipe, and likely a pipe wrench. With any luck this project will be completed, only one week after it was begun. We shall see.