Fire!

Beam me up, Scottie!

We had an interesting experience the other day. It was a snowy and chilly morning, so I put an extra log or two onto the fire. Then Irena said that she could smell some burning plastic. Well, I could not smell anything. About half an hour later, we found that a lot of the tiles in the bathroom had cracked. Well, the chimney from the main fireplace goes up through the bathroom. And the chimney was on fire! Then we started to notice the smoke that was coming from the ceiling. Yes, we have a wooden ceiling for all of the top floor, with big wooden beams. I managed to get up into the loft (the first time I had ever been up there) and yes, we had a serious fire. Some idiot had left a hole in the cement floor behind the chimney and now there was a serious fire inside the wooden ceiling. Well, to cut a long story short, I made a hole through the cement floor of the loft and poured in lots of water. Fortunately, this did not cause a huge electrical problem, even though the chimney is right above the main fuse box, and it did finally put out the fire. The smell was absolutely horrible, in case you had not guessed.

Lots of wood!

It could have been a lot worse, I suppose. The loft is really a huge timber store, full of very dry wood! Yes, it is lovely to live in beautiful house where so many things are made out of wood, but it is not so lovely if you do not want to get barbecued. If the chimney fire had happened during the night, then of course we would have been asleep and the house would have burned down.

Well, so far in Daveri we have been poisoned with mushrooms and we have had self-inflicted arson. I wonder what will be our next little misadventure. Shooting? An explosion? A car crash, perhaps?

And some more wood!

Now we need to get both of our chimneys cleaned properly. My guess is that there was a large buildup of soot and other residues inside the chimney. When this became very hot, it all caught on fire. Then what do we need to do? Perhaps we need to have some sort of new lining inside the chimney, to reduce the risk of fire. A heat-proof sealant around the chimney would probably be a good idea too. However, the underlying cause of the fire is more complicated. We have been burning firewood that was not properly dry, so it has not burned cleanly and we have used a lot more wood. This means that we need to look carefully at home we are buying and storing the wood. The woodshed is actually quite damp and we have been burning wood as soon as we buy it, when in fact it really takes about six months to dry the wood properly.

We could not stay at Daveri without any heating and yes, the smell was still very bad the next day. So now we are staying in our apartment in Veliko Tarnovo. There was masses of snow when we woke up this morning. And here is a photo that I have taken from our dining room window.