I said before that my house was built in 1934, and that it’s had three additions (that I know of, though I can’t identify all of them) in the intervening decades. This resulted in a few quirks, one of which is The Mystery Chimney.
When I bought the house there were three chimneys; one for the front bedroom fireplace, one for the living room fireplace (now wood-burning stove), and another one that didn’t go to anything. The Mystery Chimney is between the kitchen and the bathroom, and takes up a corner of the already too-small bathroom. The SO decided she’ redecorate, and has ripped out the sink, two cabinets, the medicine cabinet with its mirrors, and the floor. No telling when we’ll have a real bathroom back, since she can’t put in cabinets and a new sink until after the new floor is put down, and the handyman (who is tied up for the next month anyway) can’t put the tile down until the SO fixes the drywall. Originally she was going to make The Mystery Chimney a ‘feature’. We’ve decided it would be better to tear down the chimney and use the space for something functional like shelves. So now we have to wait for the handyman so he can send some guys over to tear down the masonry and repair the resulting hole in the roof.
Naturally, I said ‘Wouldn’t it be great if someone hid a bag of $20 gold pieces in there?’ The SO thought that was a weird thing to think. The handyman came over to look at what it would take to lay the tile, and we talked about the chimney. He said, ‘You think maybe someone hid money in there?’ The SO laughed because she thought it was strange that two people would think such a strange thing. I was talking to a coworker this morning, and he suggested the money-hidden-in-the-chimney thing. Is this a ‘guy thing’? Or is the SO just not into finding buried treasure?
But we (well, she) did find buried treasure! Removing the drywall from one side of the framing around The Mystery Chimney, she discovered the ash door. She was pretty excited about that ‘feature’ until we decided the chimney will be torn down. Father up, she found…
Ours is not quite as nice as the one in the eBay listing above, but that’s what it looks like. For ten bucks it’s not much of a ‘treasure’, but it’s still a nifty find.
I’ll just be happy to have a completed bathroom again.
We haven’t torn it out yet. But there’s no need for a wood-burning stove in the bathroom. A small space heater does just fine. And the bathroom is so small, we could really use that extra 2.25 square feet.
Are you 100% sure nothing in the basement connects to it? In our old house the furnace vents through the chimney.
In newer construction it would have its own vent I guess.
Oh, I had the opposite - the Chimney that Disappeared. Saw an ad for my house in the paper back in the 60’s, it said it had two fireplaces.
It doesn’t.
When I had the floors redone the floor guy found the remains of the other fireplace - there had been a fire, the floor was still scorched, and they must have taken it down.
We have a chimney in one corner of our kitchen. There’s also a brick pad next to it. A wood burning stove could be put on the pad and the flue connected to the chimney, if we wanted. We assume that’s what the chimney is for.
Oddly, the chimney is now behind drywall and half of it (and the wall behind the stove pad) has been covered with decorative fake bricks. Our current stove is on the brick pad.
No basement. Post-and-block. The furnace was but in by my friend when he bought the house in 2001. (I bought it from him in 2003.) It’s a propane wall unit that vents out the wall.
I was just joking about the wood stove. In a bathroom you’d want an open hearth fireplace. Anyway, I can understand wanting the extra space. I ended up taking the closet out of an adjoining room to get more space in the bathroom.
That chimney probably used to vent a stove in the kitchen. We had the same thing in the house I grew up in (built in 1920s) that we tore out when we renovated our kitchen in the 1990s. It was full of soot, made a huge mess in the rest of the house.
There’s a wall between the bathroom and the kitchen. I’m guessing that the bathroom, laundry room, and little bedroom are one of the additions made to the house. (The SO wondered if there was an outhouse where the shed is. There’s a pipe in the yard where a well used to be, so I’m guessing there was no plumbing 80 years ago.) The chimney is outside of the kitchen area, but it looks like one face of it is actually just under some drywall in the kitchen. The ash door would thus be outside. It would also be perpendicular to the kitchen (presumably then-exterior) wall. The flue, which had the linked cover over it, is on the same face as the ash door. Not really sure how it would have been set up originally.
Incidentally, and unrelated to The Mystery Chimney, the kitchen seems to have once had a window where the stove is now. When we renovated the middle bedroom, the window framing was in the wall between that bedroom and the kitchen. Unfortunately for whoever tears that wall down, the only ‘treasure’ they’ll find is ‘Hi From [Johnny L.A.] and [The Significant Other], 2010’ written in black Sharpie.
Fredrick Forsyth wrote a short story about a man who murdered his unfaithful wife and bricked her up in the fire place, where heat from the fires mummified her body. So, be careful about demolition. You might find …something…other than money.