The guys had a 20 foot ladder. It's not long enough to get to the roof to drop the new flues into place. So they needed this...
When we moved in, we had the chimneys cleaned and inspected. Not surprisingly, the flues were in bad shape. So bad that we couldn't use the fireplaces without risking burning the house down. Enough of the mortar is missing that we'd get "heat transfer" and start the walls on fire.
Of course, the cost to re-line one chimney is about the same as converting 3 fireplaces to gas inserts. Pretty simple decision there...
We've known we wanted to do this for a long time, so we'd been looking at various options. It turns out that the fireplaces were originally coal-burners. For those, the fireboxes are smaller than in a wood-burning fireplace. The net result is that most inserts are too big to fit, so our choices were somewhat limited.
We finally get enough other things done to prioritize the fireplaces. It didn't hurt that the timing worked out with a sale at the vendor we'd picked a while back.
The installers showed up today and things went pretty smoothly (other than not having a suitable ladder ;-).
The installation is mostly done. The new gas lines just need to be inspected before the face-plates can be installed. All that should be done about this time next week.
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