Tree Limbs & Chimneys

I filled up the yard waste dumpster last weekend, but if one stomps enough on the yard waste in the dumpster, a little more room can be freed up. So I've been stomping and refilling and stomping and refilling, but I think today was the last day I could get away with that. 

Truth is, with a little more time and a different time of year - when the trees aren't full of leaves, super thick, and borderline impossible to see into - I probably could have filled up a 40 yd. dumpster, the trees are that overgrown. But knowing that I only had a little room left and another couple days of the rented dumpster, I wanted to make sure I did one more round of tree-trimming up on the roof, cutting anything I needed to cut but didn't get to the first go-round.  

When I first started doing some preliminary work in the yard, the roof was a catastrophe. There are 5 trees, 3 large ones and 2 medium-sized ones, in close proximity to the roof; all 5 had branches growing into the house's walls, and all 5 had branches hanging over the house, mere inches above it. That's a recipe for a litany of bad things, ranging from holes in the roof to clogged gutters to having lots of critters essentially living on the roof. A few weeks back, on a cold day apparently, I maxed out my little 16' extension ladder, climbed up on the roof, and cleaned it off.

If the ground below when I was done trimming branches and brooming acorns off the roof was any indication, I put a solid dent in what needed to be done.

On the most recent venture up to the roof, I wanted to cut anything I might have missed the first time, and tackle a few additional limbs I left in place previously. It had been pretty windy the first time I was up on the roof cutting limbs, and I didn't see any reason to tiptoe out to the roof's edge and do some risky stuff just to cut a couple limbs when there were about 8,000 limbs that still needed to be cut and could be reached from the ground.

​Additionally, I wanted to try out the little 20V cordless pole chainsaw I was recently gifted, which turned out to do a far better job on flimsy limbs and tough angle cuts than the elbow-grease powered pole saw does. It's a good little tool to have in the arsenal, allowed me to cut some of the dead wood hanging over the house and deck.

While I was on the roof I started thinking about the chimneys. There are 2 obvious (no longer functional) fireplaces in the house's big front room, those correspond to the 2 chimneys in the right side of the pic below. In the left side of the pic, that chimney serves as a flu for the furnace and water heater in the basement.      

But...every old newspaper ad I've found where the house was listed for sale always says "fireplace". Singular. Why then are there 2 fireplace chimneys? Was the ad a typo? Are the 2 fireplaces not original? 

I have a hard time buying that a house this small, and built for working class people, was so fancy as to originally have 2 fireplaces, let alone with marble surrounds. It's possible, but the more time I spend inside the house, the more I doubt that the big front room's goodies are entirely original. Windows and casing? Yes. Everything else...I have doubts. 

The chimney in the left side of the pic, it runs through the bedroom, which was been redone with wood framing and drywall, so I can't really trace the chimney below the roof just yet. Likewise, the basement is "finished' and I haven't torn it out yet, so I don't know what the chimney/flu looks like down there either. 

But I wonder...is it possible that the back left chimney was the original fireplace, before a flu for a furnace was ever needed, and the 2 in the front room were added later? That seems a little crazy, but somebody went to the trouble to remove at least 1 wall in the big front room, and whoever did the work did a pretty good job of hiding the fact that a wall was ever there. 

I wonder what's hiding behind the drywall in that bedroom...could there be a fireplace?