Blessing in disguise?

This is my little fireplace in our mud room. It serves no real purpose at least not for heating the house or anything. But it made it oh so comfy cozy to strip off all that horrible wet winter clothing in the coldest months this winter.

When I went through our insurance policy because it was up for renewal. I found out they had excluded our fireplace. That just didn't sit right. I could just imagine (knock on wood) any fire in the house would automatically be blamed on the fireplace and therefore not be covered.

Thinking I was pretty smart. I decided to change insurance brokers and make sure it was included in the policy.

Well

a month later.

a lot of pictures. E-mails and phone calls later

our new insurer has deemed that we will not be covered unless we remove the fireplace.

So with Chris home for the long weekend we finally managed to get it out.

I miss it already. and am not looking forward to how cold that room gets in the winter when it wasn't lit.

It sure makes the mudroom look huge with it gone.

and with it out of the way, I went back to painting the walls. (much easier when your not hanging off a ladder sideways trying to reach around a stove pipe.)

And honestly when we took it out and looked over the condition. I'm not surprised the insurance agencies where worried it was a fire hazard.

The bricks in the back had obviously heated up so much most of them were cracked.

the stove pipe wasn't properly secured it was resting full weight on the top of the stove.

and the metal mat? we thought was underneath it?

turned out to be some sort of spongy mat with a thin metal coating on the surface.

Not impressed.

I guess it was probably a good thing we took everything out when we did.