This morning, immediately after enjoying breakfast with 
Let's rewind to about a week ago...
Our chimney started smoking out of the wrong end and filling half of our upstairs rooms with smoke ( we are luck to have a shared corridor between two sides of the house ).
It was quite upsetting, even more, as we had tried to clean it days before. A process that included detaching the stove pipe and putting it back in, which was quite an operation.
Inhaling smoke isn't fun and we ended up moving to the other end of the house. 'Luckily', we recently moved our bed there and it is a spacious enough room with a nice balcony with a stunning mountain view, as depicted in the picture below and/or at the top of this post.
Long story (not) short, we ( or was it Clare? ) came up with the ingenious idea to buy a one pit heater, working on gas, big enough for our biggest pan. A heavy pan that we, previously, had to boil water in on the kitchen stove and then carry down two sets of stairs, trying not to pour the boiling water over ourselves, before we would eventually pour it into the bath that the other person was enjoying. And all that, several times. All of this, just because we only have a limited amount of hot water ( heated in the tank above the wood burning stove ) that isn't enough for taking a bath in.
Anyhow, we hoped that this new, one pit burner, next to the bath, would save us time and energy. That it would allow the person taking a bath to be autonomous and as an added bonus that it would allow us to fill a bath without even using the wood burner. It would save us the hassle of collecting firewood, sawing it and so on and so forth.
And thus I tried, this morning, after having installed the thing ( attaching the hose to the gas bottle and the furnace )...
I ended up spending 2 more hours in the bathroom. One of them was spent heating up water ( 5 pans? ) and pouring them in the bath, one by one. By then, I thought it would be full enough for me to sit in it and continue the process of heating more pans of water and adding the content of one, every 10 minutes or so.
The water was warm(ish) but cooled down fast and the bath only ended up being full - and hot - enough, after having spent almost an hour in it hahaha!
I was too busy focusing on the whole process to relax enough to read a book ( I am trying Jurassic Park in Italian ) and am reading a trilogy about an English woman who moved to the Italian countryside, decades ago, at the moment.
I also didn't get around to playing mouth harmonica ;<)
It was still a nice enough experience though. Salt and lavender, added to the water, helped with that.
And - in all honesty - making an effort to make all of this happen ( the whole exercise ) and even having bought the gas bottle and one pit stove myself, yesterday ( practicing my Italian ) and pushing a trolley for 15 minutes or so to bring it home, later, as well as having to go back to the shop a after dinner (with Clare) for a replacement part, as the gas regulator ( a little ring ) on the burner broke off when I tried to install/set up the thing, yesterday night.
It was all part of the fun.
I just went to the other side of the house and noticed that Clare was slightly smoking up the room again. It seems like she wants to heat up the house a bit and or have a shower later. We don't have a shower in the bath downstairs so the only way, right now, is to feed the wood burner and heat up the water tank above it etc.
It actually takes an hour or two, at least ( unless the fire is really roaring ) to get (hot) enough water for a decent shower of at least 5 minutes.
Fingers crossed that Clare doesn't have to inhale too much smoke as she's also trying to cook in there and I want her to feel good.
The chimney issues are extra frustrating because it's a shared chimney that someone who worked on a house above ours, 'accidentally', filled with crap/building materials, including parts of another chimney that was demolished.
We also had chimney and stove issues in our rental house, months ago, in Portugal and we are getting tired of this shizzle.
Anyhow, it sure made us think and Clare and I are already constructing a plan to take down the wood burning stove and possibly bring it down to the downstairs bathroom where it can both function as a heater for the house, a possible oven ( it has an oven compartment too ) and a water heater. And - even better - we can control where the exhaust pipe goes, without having to hope that the smoke finds its way through all the crap in the chimney(s) of the houses above us and actually makes it up into the air.
TO BE CONVINUED...
