Day Breeze

The part of the dilemma my wife and I felt comfortable facing was what to do with the four inch diameter plug of wood that needed to be placed in the hole where our furnace flue used to be. This is precisely the kind of project that we can get our homeowner heads around. The parts where we struggle are usually those that involve multiple moving parts and lots of equipment. If it cannot be fixed with a Makita cordless drill, it it generally beyond the scope of my abilities. Please understand that we have, together, taken on a great many household repairs and installations. We have painted the interior and, more profoundly, the exterior of our Victorian. We have planted and removed trees from our yard, the yard that was seed that we planted. It should be noted that during this lawn creation project, I managed to incapacitate the rototiller we borrowed for this job. I have a knack for breaking tools. I maintain that there is a proper tool for every job, and I'm just the guy to bend or twist it in such a way that it cannot be used again.
But it's all in the service of making our home a nicer place to live. There are, however, certain elements of our house that defy my blunt-edged carpentry and plumbing skills. Recently, we had all of our old galvanized steel pipes replaced with nice, shiny copper ones. That meant we ended up with a whole basement full of plumbing that we no longer use. That became a garage and then a back yard full of plumbing that we no longer use. Most of it is useless, as several decades of rust have made the pipes into metal rods, some of which can still pass the tiniest bit of water through them.
Shortly after we engaged in the professional plumber to generate all that detritus, the furnace that we had so carefully paid to be installed by professionals of another guild, was determined to be "on its last legs." That's technical talk that only HVAC folks know. What we came to understand was that the innards of our furnace were broken, and they needed to be replaced. The good news was that the great big hunk of metal that lives inside the great big metal box was still on warranty and we were able to get it for free. Unless you count the expense of hiring someone who knows what HVAC stands for and will come by and reconnect all those gas and electrical connections to make the furnace work again. And we got to keep the old, broken great big hunk of metal that lived in the big metal box. It is now part of the discard pile that is our home renewal. In my younger days, I might have considered finding a way to turn them into some sort of conceptual art piece. Now I see it as more of a performance piece: Haul It Away.
I will miss it all terribly, all that scrap. It was once a valuable part of my life. Now it's debris.