The Old Chimney Cap

Our handy, dandy chimney guy came this morning. On Labor Day. At 8:30 in the morning. Now that's service! (Well, except that a certain husband "forgot" to tell me he was coming and I was in my pajamas reading in the living room and got surprised when a big truck drove in our driveway.)
Jim and his worker went up on the roof to take down our old cap, assess the damage (if we'd need any new brick work) and to take measurements for the new cap. He said that while he was up there he was able to see all the way down into our kitchen. That's cool enough to ALMOST get me and R (the big height scaredy cats that we are) up on the roof! How cool would that be?!?!

We thought that they'd throw the old cap down, but they actually put together this little pulley system and lowered it down in one piece (well, relatively). The top of the cap was blue stone, just like I had guessed. We kept it, even though it's covered in tar and other gunk. Who knows.. maybe we could clean it up and re-use it for the front steps.. The cap showed areas of repair over the years. Someone had gone up there and tried to repair cracks and holes with none other than drywall tape. ............. There's just no words for that.

I just cannot get over how large the cap is... It's insane! I mean, it's obvious how wide our chimney is seeing that it takes up a 1/4 of the interior of our house, but I think I just assumed it got a lot smaller as it went up. It does, but not by much.

We won't have our new cap for a week or so, so hopefully it doesn't rain too much this week, now that we basically have a 5'x5' opening in the top of our house. But once the new one is up there... no more buckets!

Here's the old pieces of blue stone. You can see in this picture how the metal supports have just wasted away. One of the vertical supports was very close to collapsing, so we actually had very good timing.