I’m a big fan of the show Dirty Jobs on the Discovery channel. Every week I get to see Mike Rowe engaging in insanely dirty, greasy, messy activities that most of us never stop to think about. You can watch Mike get filthy doing jobs such as cleaning grease traps, processing human food waste, mining coal, emptying septic tanks, making charcoal, etc. If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend it.

So I’ve had my own dirty job over the past few days. I’ve been removing an old brick chimney/flue from inside the walls of my house. My house was built in the 1930 and, I’m almost certain, was initially heated by coal. To vent the coal smoke there is an old chimney that runs up the wall of the original kitchen (which has its own flue for what I presume was a wood stove). I believe this project qualifies as the dirtiest (corporally speaking) thing I’ve ever encountered or attempted. You cannot believe how dirty an 80 year old chimney is!

read more »