Marianne Suhr's Christmas tale

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A real fire is one of the greatest joys of owning an old house. Sitting in front of crackling logs on a cold winter’s night is the pay-off for living in a building where the spiders run riot, the dusting never stops and the low beams lie in wait for tall people who forget to duck.

We inherited an inglenook fireplace and chimney that had been pretty much left alone. Though it’s not particularly special – many houses of this age have similar inglenook fireplaces that were used for heating and probably cooking – it makes a great focal point in the room, with its wide hearth designed to take long logs that needed less chopping.

To get the fireplace into a state of readiness, a crawl around in the roof space revealed some crumbling bricks to the main stack, something you often find just under the roofline in older chimneys with no damp-proof course. My brilliant brickie, Mike Jones, patch-repaired the stack and replaced the dodgy bricks at the beginning of the project. But that is when we made our fatal error. With all the scaffolding in place to repair the stack, we agonised over whether to fit a guard to stop potential nesting birds.

ABOVE (left-right): Just six months-worth of twigs, courtesy of the local jackdaw family who chose to nest on top of the chimney; The sitting room before work started.

The stack had always been open at the top, probably for the best part of 350 years, so I took the approach ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. The existing chimney had a fantastic ‘draw’, and I was worried that by fiddling around with the top we would reduce the draw and stop it from working so well. Little did I know that a whole flock of jackdaws were hiding behind a bush in our garden, earmarking our stack for their headquarters and just waiting for us to remove the scaffolding.

As soon as it was down, with the opportunity to change our minds firmly in the past, the birds got to work importing vast quantities of sticks and dropping them down our chimney. Each morning we were greeted with a little pile of twigs on our hearth, and we knew we had a problem. When my partner, Richard, and our neighbour, Ed, removed the chimney canopy, an avalanche of sticks rained down, burying our log basket and fireside accessories.

In the inglenook, we removed the flaky modern masonry paint with peel-away paint stripper to get back to the brick. Mike returned to replace the odd brick that had disintegrated, using carefully sourced matching bricks, dabbed over with a little soot and water to help them blend in with the old.

The finished result was a triumph. I found some fabulous old firedogs at a local junk shop, and collected all the scraps of wood left over from the repair work ready for burning. The twigs from the birds’ nest made fabulous kindling, a minor consolation for the hassle they had caused.

Now that I have a young son to think about, and with Christmas Eve fast approaching, suddenly our inglenook has taken on a completely new dimension. With the arrival of Father Christmas imminent, any blockages to our flue could seriously jeopardise our grown-up enjoyment of Max’s first Christmas. So with the chimney swept and a stocking hanging on the mantelpiece, we’re all ready for the magical night of the 24th of December.

ABOVE (left-right): Chimney sweep Dennis Northcott removes yet more twigs from one of the chimneys; Mike Jones repairing the chimney stack before work started on the inglenook; The final stages of removing the masonry paint is a messy, fume-filled job so masks are an essential part of the kit.