So a couple of weeks ago I had my chimneys swept and I have been looking forward to recommissioning my living-room fireplace ever since – but with a new twist.

The sweep – smashing guy, very knowledgable – essentially told me that I was doing my wood fireplace wrong, using a coal-fire style basket with logs up in the air, where they are away from the thermal mass of their ashes.

This is why (he says) you find indoor wood fires with half-burned logs, whereas bonfires outdoors invariably are reduced to cinders. Apparently you should never clean out an open log-fire fully, instead leaving a bed of ashes upon which to lay your next logs, removing the top if/when it gets too high.

An annual cleanup is permissible.

All this rung true, so having checked out my firepit for any damage, I removed the grating leaving only the “fence” in front of the kindling and logs, and in front of that I set up my ever-present fireguard – big wire-mesh thing, covering the front of the fireplace precisely.

Boy am I glad for the fireguard.

About two hours after setting the fire – when the second and third logs were just getting going – there was a thunderous BANG! and both logs blew out of the fireplace, over the 5″ high fence, and landed on the hearth, retained from rolling out into the room by the aforementioned fireguard.

Basically it looks like another piece of former-resident-household-DIY has tried to kill me; every time I/my builder try to overhaul bits of the house we find yet another DIY disaster put in by the previous residents[1].

In this case someone has – at some point, probably when installing the fairly hideous brick fireplace and mantle – skimmed the firebrick with a layer of concrete that blew out-and-up taking the logs with it. I’ve removed nearly a square foot of debris (a sheet 5 to 10mm thick) from the fire’s cinders.

No damage has been done except to the concrete… but just in case, for the moment, the fireguard is back in place and is being held there by (at the bottom) a huge chunk of granite and (at the top) a metal rake, wedged with a 20lb 9 platter 200Mb Honeywell disk-drive pack, which is the heaviest single weight I had to hand.

Once it cools I’ll clean it out, remove any other potential hazard with a bolster and lump hammer, and then line the firepit with sand, just to be sure for next time.

OTOH: it looks nice, is burning well (my 9m-high chimney is rather good, I am told) and I now have a reasonable plan for replacing the whole thing next year.

And the house is warm and pleasant.

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[1] like the 14 meter copper pipe loop joining gas boiler to hot water tank, most of the loop’s run being flat and a nightmare for airlocks; also the four floorboards sawn-through off-joist and resting on the pipes.