so this is clint santer he is our chimney expert who we're working with today clint you've obviously done some poking around what have you found well we have an early 1930s fireplace here that was probably earlier uh used for coal burning has since been used for wood burning what are so from cold to wood but we do want to burn wood in it today can we do that um right now no but hopefully toward the end of the day we'll have it fixed up and ready to go all right hopefully so what do we need to do to get it fixed up uh well at this point the fireplace here has no damper at all the damper is actually the door that opens and closes that lets the smoke out of the out of the fireplace here up the chimney um you also have no flue liner in this chimney you just have the brick chimney walls so no liners no damper no line but at some point i presume they burned wood or coal in this fireplace without that liner what does the liner do for us well the liner is very important for uh containing the byproducts of combustion yeah the carbon monoxide the smoke um and it's also important for heat transfer we want to fire in the fireplace not in the house so i guess we're going to add one of those and a damper what do we need to do to get started well the area here between the firebox and the chimney is very narrow and we need to remove some of these brick here to be able to pull the liner down all right well let's get to work i'm just going to remove these bricks using my jack hammer now we've got all our brick removed here we're going to need to clean the actually clean the chimney to remove all the creosote deposits before we actually pull the liner down and for that i'm going to use my spinning poly brush here connected to a poly rod and my electric drill based on our fireplace opening inside the home we're required to install a 10 inch diameter liner okay normally we would install a round liner in this situation a round liner wouldn't fit so we had it ovalized so you literally just started with something around and they squished it down to this exactly all right so it's still the right size though yes and the material this is stainless steel all right push hard there you go all right here's our liner and now we're just going to pull it out and attach the mesh base plate okay all right now we just have to move this around a little more that should do it okay all right good job right about there come down just a little bit just gonna flatten out this part of the mesh here okay all right we're all set so we need to mix some water i need to make some water let's do it okay and for the finishing touch we're making a nice and smooth the damp paint brush all right kevin uh here we're going to insulate our liner um it's very important to insulate a liner for two reasons first of all to to keep the heat within the liner itself so that the heat doesn't transfer to the combustibles of the home the wood framing of the house we don't want that to catch on fire and have ourselves a house fire exactly second of all a warm liner is obviously going to draft a lot better than a cold one okay all right i would normally use a an insulation blanket to wrap this liner yeah before i pulled it down and um in this situation i don't have the room for that so we're going to use a poured in insulation today okay so we had some bags of dry mix which we put some water in and that's sort of a soupy concoction here yes and basically we're just going to set this up at the top and kind of trowel it in and i'm just going to trowel this out flat here nice there we are all right kevin this is our top plate we're going to install it and seat it down with a bead of high temp silicone all right so just slide this over our liner exactly got it there i do all right i'm just going to tighten the clamp okay all right this is our top ceiling damper yep we're going to install it here the existing fireplace doesn't have a damper right so this one's going to be mounted here at the top and controlled by this handle that's going to mount inside the firebox we're going to drop the cable down the inside of the liner yeah and so that's actually going to be the way to operate this so when you're not having a fire damper's closed and then when you're having a fire just open it up you would open it up exactly all right so feed that in that down all right mary we're going to show you now how to operate the damper all right to open i'm going to release this handle so that's the position it should be when you have a fire yes and now to close it simply bring it down and latch and that's where it should be when you don't have a fire so it seems easy enough right yes it does