More weekend projects

Our lives revolve around weekend projects. A few weekends ago it was cleaning up the yard in preparation for winter. Then we needed to organize our basement so we could actually find stuff down there. Today, I convinced Joe that it was time to take on our fireplace.

We have a gas fireplace that was installed in 1998 (we found an inspection tag with this date). It wasn't the most expensive of fireplaces to begin with, but good enough. Anyhow, we haven't been running it because it was filthy and we wanted to take the time to really clean it up and look it over first so we were safe. Today, we disassembled it and cleaned the entire thing and put it back together again. It is working, other than the blower isn't. We got new burning ember things, replaced the rocks, cleaned the glass, and inspected it all pretty carefully. We discovered a mouse trap in our fireplace.... one of those ones where you don't have to see your catch. It was tripped. I wonder how long...... ugh.... we might have had a mummy mouse in the fireplace.

We dropped by a fireplace place today and chatted with a guy about the seal on our glass and looked at beautiful stoves. Here is the one I want:

Isn't it beautiful? Of course, it is also around $3,000, so we will be wish-listing this item for awhile. It might need to go after the hot tub and cob pizza oven.

For now we have:

Can you see Fritz inspecting it all very carefully? In overalls! How cute are babies in overalls?!?!?!

I have also decided that tomorrow we will be painting the fireplace. The wood is in rough shape. At one time it was pretty, but now it needs a facelift. I plan to spend tomorrow painting. Yay for us! But, it should look nice by my appointments on Tuesday.

P.S. Just so no one worries about our safety, we did pick up a brand new carbon monoxide detector today to be sure we aren't going to kill ourselves with the fireplace.