The structural part of the chimney rebuild, for all intents and purposes, is complete. 

Last time I wrote something here, I left off at about this point:

Seems like forever ago that I was at this point. I'm glad I covered up the flu going down to the basement; this allowed me to add some stoutness to the structure and make it a little more solid, hopefully, than what had been entirely single wythe walls.

From there, up she went:

Doing this work is a lot like tile work in that no matter how dead on I get things, I kinda hate all of it until it's done. These bricks are slightly different sizes and there ain't a straight edge or square face on many of them, which makes level and plumb tough marks to uniformly hit. But, once it's all pointed and cleaned up, the mortar does a good job of softening all the brick edges that don't quite line up with each other.

I kinda liked the style of damper the chimney had, but they require a clay liner to sit on. Luckily, there's a place a couple miles down Gravois that sells that sort of stuff (I get all my brick mortar, type o, which the big box stores don't carry, there too) so I was able to pickup a 2' section pretty easily. I cut it in half and mortared it into the top two courses.

The chimney needed a cap and concrete is typically the material of choice. I could have formed and poured it in place but I didn't like that option -- I didn't think I'd be able to form it real well given the imperfections in the brick. Instead, I took some measurements, built a form in the shop, and poured the cap there. 

The cap is 2" thick at the outside edges, 2.25" thick around the hole for the clay liner, and wound up being heavy enough to be a super challenging thing to get up to the roof. But, I think the whole thing turned out pretty well, especially compared to what had been there previously (identical to the chimney towards the front of the house).

I still need to run a stainless steel liner down the flue and get the damper and damper cap installed, but that shouldn't be too painful. And, it can wait; completing the masonry portion of the job called for a celebratory hike and swim. 

With any luck I'll get the chimney buttoned up, inside and out, before it gets too cold to work outside. Got a basement window in about the same predicament, and a whole other exterior project I want to tackle before winter sets in, so we'll see...

One of the projects on the 2025 to-do list was rebuilding at least one of the two chimneys on the east wall of the house. A couple weeks ago, I started that project. 

The chimneys, which were previously rebuilt in the half-assed fashion that's typical of most of the prior "rehabs" the house has undergone, are in rough shape. The chimney I chose to tackle is the northernmost of the two; the cap was cracked, the unnecessary parging on the yard side of the chimney had delaminated and allowed a ton of water into the wall, and the roof membrane "flashing" was absolute trash.   

Here's a better look at some of the problems:

See the leafy thing in the bottom lefthand corner of the pic below? Vegetation isn't supposed to be growing out of walls, let alone 18' up the wall. This is how the parapet vegetation in the bottom righthand corner of the pic starts out. 

Once I really took some time to assess the chimney's condition and knowing some major brick surgery was going to be required, I decided to first repoint a section of the wall below the chimney and parapet. I feel a whole lot better about tearing out and rebuilding sections of parapet when there's a solid area beneath it. 

Repointing a lower section first also gave me some time to figure out how to erect another level of scaffold, which I needed to get up to the parapet and chimney elevation. My scaffold just barely fits -- I had to cut some tree branches to make it happen -- in this little corner between the house and the porch, and getting that 4th set of scaffold frames up to the top is no picnic.

Then it was time to start the deconstruction. I figured it would go fast; the walls with rotten, waterlogged mortar come apart without any real effort. 

I'd never given it much thought, but I realized that these chimneys have two flues: the one on the left goes to the basement (finished, livable space when the house built in 1878) and would have served, presumably, some sort of wood or coal burning stove or furnace; the flue on the right goes to the fireplace on the main floor. 

I also discovered that the flue to the main floor fireplace had a liner...except it only goes halfway down to the firebox, which makes it pointless. Remember the comment about half-assed work...example #381. 

The stainless steel liner comes in 4' sections, but I couldn't for the life of me bust this section free. It wasn't until I worked my way down a little further than I could see why: the sections had been riveted together. 

If you look closely, just above the seem between two liner sections, you'll see a little hole. That's where I drilled out one of the rivets. Unfortunately, there was another rivet on the roof side that I had no way reasonable to get to horizontally. Fortunately, I own a lot of hammers and a lot of long pieces of steel, and I was able to stick some steel down through the top of the liner, catch the rivet, and beat on it until it snapped, allowing me to remove that liner section.  

In that same pic, you can see the top of the wall section I repointed. I'm super, super glad I made the decision to do that before I started this demo. 

I tore out just about everything I could reach and called it quits once I started hitting mortar that was still pretty solid. After a little cleanup, I was able to start rebuilding walls.

I had a hard time reaching some of the first few chimney courses I needed to reset, and on the yard side of the wall the parapet bricks stair step and protrude and do all kinds of things that require a strong attention to detail, so the work started off slowly. 

I will eventually rebuild this entire length of parapet, but for now, I'm just dealing with this section. I use shims to keep a little pressure between the freshly set bricks and the existing bricks while the mortar sets up, and I try to leave myself some strategic places where I can interlock the subsequent parapet rebuilds into this one.

The slowest courses to deal with, by far, are the rows of brick that protrude past the brick in the course below. The easiest way to deal with those rows is to finagle some wood in place to act as a shelf for the bricks until the mortar cures.

After that, it's off to the races (unless I get rained out, like I did today). I decided to cover up the basement flue, because it's not needed and will give me a little more structure to help keep the chimney solid and plumb for many years to come. 

I had to custom cut a bunch of bricks to make it work, but I covered the basement flue with some 1/4" cement board to prevent a ton of mortar from dripping into the basement, and then I stuck 1" steel angle I had laying around under each row of brick that went across the flue. That should be more than enough strength to keep the bricks from sagging, and will allow me to go vertical on a solid base.

Today I finished setting bricks on that layer and was ready to start going up...and then we got about 4" of rain in 20 minutes. Chimney work will have to wait for another day, but the next step will be to get the roof membrane flashed around the chimney.  

The yard is full of glass, this has been well documented. Most of it is tiny pieces of indeterminate trash. Vintage trash, but trash nonetheless. Occasionally, if I'm really digging, I'll kick up old medicine bottles or busted soda and beer bottles. Those are fun to find.

A couple weekends ago, when I wasn't looking for any glass, I found this while spreading some excavated dirt:

I didn't know what to make of it -- 10 ounces of PE-something. I was thinking soda or medicine (beer would have been brown/amber glass), Google wasn't much help, and I was pretty content to let this thing be a mystery. Later in the day curiosity got the better of me and I tried a little more research.

I don't remember how I figured it out, but I figured it out -- and I should have figured it out much sooner. 

It's a 10 ounce jar that contained a Pevely Dairy product, like sour cream or cottage cheese. Here's a picture I found online of an intact, 10 ounce Pevely jar:

Pretty similar, eh? It's gotta be a 10 ounce Pevely jar fragment. 

Pevely Dairy was once a massive, local dairy operation that got its start in 1887 in Pevely, MO. A farmer there named Mark Kerckhoff started running butter and milk to St. Louis, and the products' popularity grew following Kerckhoff's son Daniel winning a prize for the dairy products at the 1904 World's Fair (held at Forest Park in St. Louis, MO).

At that time, Pevely was still a small business, operating out of 1312 South 7th Street, just south of present day downtown St. Louis.  

The business would quickly grow, necessitating multiple larger facilities. In 1917, Pevely Dairy moved to the corner of Grand and Chouteau, which is about a mile north of my house. 

The factory was expanded in 1943, 1945, 1975, 1985, and 1997. A garage was built nearby in 1928, and the smokestack, barely visible in the above pic, was built in 1943. Business was good for many, many years.

In 2008, Pevely Dairy was bought by Prairie Farms Dairy, another prominent name in the local dairy scene. Prairie Farms closed the Grand & Chouteau factory and sold the property to St. Louis University (SLU) in 2011.

Sadly, despite being listed in the National Register of Historic Places, protests, and general public uproar, SLU tore the Pevely complex down in 2012. I wrote a 100-page graduate report on just how shitty St. Louis University is when it comes to urban land (re)development, and that was BEFORE this happened. But, SLU has deep, deep pockets and apparently threatened to move their entire medical campus to St. Louis County if St. Louis City didn't allow the demo, so...it all came down.

To be fair, the site is now home to SLU's new hospital, and a new children's hospital is currently under construction. The hospital complex is a good-looking set of buildings, albeit not the same architecture as the buildings they replaced.

Can't preserve 'em all, and there are worse things that could have happened to the property.

All that said, this little chunk of glass isn't my first connection to Pevely.

In the 1920s-1940s, Pevely Dairy had a 700-acre farm in an area known as Crescent, MO, which is about a 30 minute drive from my house down HWY 44. 300 cows, 200 employees, greenhouses, barns, the big Kerckhoff family mansion...the farm property was quite an operation.

Today, it's all gone, replaced by houses and golf courses. 

Except it's not ALL gone. Not entirely.

At the time I didn't know that Pevely's dairy operation had been nearby, many decades ago. To me, the park was just a big suburban flood plain field next to a wooded area next to a river, with a bunch of trails running through all of it. And, a railroad track bisected the park; we always stayed on the river side of the tracks.

One day, when Roscoe wanted to keep going after our usual jaunt to the river and back, we crossed the train tracks to explore that part of the park. Just on the other side of the tracks, we were greeted by this: 

If I see an old building, I instinctively need to know its story. I went home, did some digging, and that's when I realized that the park land had, at one time, either been part of the Pevely dairy farm or adjacent to it.

The structure in the picture is one of the Pevely farm pump houses. A little further into the woods there's an old, moss-covered concrete wall that must have served some farm purpose at one time. 

Over the subsequent years, Roscoe and I walked every square inch of the lower portion of that park. All weather conditions, all terrain types, all distances. Every hike there was a great hike. 

When Roscoe got himself a little sister (Freckles), he got to show her around the park a handful of times before age caught up with him and his legs stopped cooperating. 

Puppy Freckles was as exploratory and high-energy as they come, she didn't hesitate to check out the Pevely farm remnants. 

When Freckles got herself a little brother (Farley), she carried on the tradition and showed him around the place.

Roscoe passed away almost 2 years ago and we don't visit this park and the Pevely remnants quite as often as we used to. Freckles, who's almost 6, and Farley, who's almost 2 and definitely every bit of 120 pounds, are high-energy pups that prefer running, swimming, and playing fetch; they're not laid back trail dogs like Roscoe was.

But, a year after Roscoe died we took his ashes out there to scatter some of them in the river, and I'll always think of the park as the place where I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours with my buddy. Because of that, no matter how spazzy any dogs ever are, I'll take 'em there from time to time to walk the trails, splash around in the river, and sniff out what's left of the old Pevely place, just like Roscoe did. 

Finding what turned out to be old Pevely glass in the yard was kinda cool, but being reminded of the many trips Roscoe and I took to the old Pevely farm was even better. 

It only took me a year, but the first full basement window replacement is complete.

To be fair, if the project had been limited to just replacing the windows, I probably could have gotten the job done in a month. But the project wound up being -- as I assumed it would be -- much, much more than just swapping out some the old window sashes for a couple new ones. 

The project started here:

The limestone was covered in paint and the mortar was visibly cracked. I figured if I was going to freshen up the window, I might as well address the limestone first. That turned into a full blown repointing effort, including about a foot of stone below grade.

The mortar around the window opening was garbage due to years and years and years of water infiltration, so that required a pretty intense rebuilding/repointing effort.

I had to do a similar amount of work on the interior side of the wall as well. Once the limestone had been buttoned up, I replaced 3/4 of the original jamb. I probably could have replaced the top piece as well, but it was in decent shape and the curved pieces are easily the most time-consuming to mill. If what was there wasn't broke, I wasn't gonna fix it.

From there it was on to making new sashes, which replaced rotten reproductions. The sashes were complicated builds because they overlap in the middle, which adds a little wrinkle to the math and milling process. Ultimately, the fit of the sashes, brick mould, and storm window sash all boils down to getting the radius of the original jamb piece calculated on the nose. 

There's a place down the street, an architectural millwork shop, that sells the straight runs of brick mould (exterior window trim) off the shelf. I considered just buying it from them, and having them mill the curved piece, but the sales guy is a pain in the ass to deal with. He said they wouldn't work from dimensions, they wanted a template instead. I figured if I was gonna have to go to the trouble of making a template, I may as well pony up a few bucks for a custom router bit and make the stuff myself. 

​So I did. The dimensions and profile match the original stuff about as close as I could have hoped for, given that the original brick mould -- had to get dimensions from it for the custom router bit -- was caked with about 17 layers of paint.

When I dry fit the brick mould, I realized that some of the gaps between it and the stone were way, way too large to caulk. I ended up cutting little strips out of 3/4" thick stock to match the limestone profile and carefully, painstakingly attached them to the brick mould. Knowing how tough those things would be to paint, I made sure to get a couple coats on in the shop before installation.

Caulking was still tricky in some of the hard to reach spaces, but a set of little artist brushes came in real handy when it was time for final paint. 

The last thing I had to make was a storm window sash. 

That went pretty well, and I was able to get the thing to fit just like I wanted it to; there's about a 1/8" gap all the way around except for the bottom, which has a couple plastic furniture feet things recessed into the rail and keeps the sash off the stone sill. This allows for air circulation between the sash and the sill, which should help prevent the thing from rotting.  

I put some thin, adhesive weather stripping around the inside face of the storm window sash, which does a pretty good job of sealing it up from the outside. And, it's not visible from the exterior side, or the interior side.

The sash is held in place with 4 hook and eyelets. There might be a better method but this seemed to work once I got everything adjusted to provide a gently snug fit between the sash and the jamb.  

That's it. That's the window. 1 year of work, but everything turned out pretty well. It helps to imagine the brick repainted and some landscaping at the base of the wall, but this is definitely a large step in the right direction. 

The next window is right behind this one -- another day or two for glazing on the storm sash to cure enough for paint and a dry weekend for installation, and I may be able to say that TWO of the basement window replacement projects are wrapped up.

Last time we talked, I rambled on about one of the pharmacy bottles I found while digging big holes in the yard. Here are the other 6 that I pulled out of the ground, pretty much seconds after discovering them:

I'll need a legit project, maybe replacing the fence along the back property line, or rebuilding the retaining wall that keeps my yard several feet above the alley, to warrant any more excavation. It's time consuming work, and messy, and it screws up the yard, and there's zero guarantee of finding anything -- not a real high benefit to cost ratio. But there is more stuff in the ground, I'm convinced of that. 

Some of the other finds included:

I cleaned everything as best I could and put the bottles on a mantel for the time being. All the other items -- the busted soda bottles, fragments of dishware, mechanical/metal items, broken toys, etc. -- are in a tub, waiting for a decision on what to keep and what's really just trash.

For now...that's how things will stay; the weather is finally warm enough and dry enough to work outside, and I've got windows to finish replacing...