Once you get started, it's difficult to stop the innuendos, when you have a chimney sweep round to attend to your flue! We've been knocking our dining room around over the last six weeks, so the whole house currently smells like a pit pony. However, the end is in sight and I'm now having dreams in soft focus of my newly gorgeous dining room being aspirationally featured in Cheshire Life. That is of course once my Dad has been up from darkest Lincolnshire to give us a masterclass in wallpaper hanging.
So, as part of the final stages of the dining room master plan, Jimmy the Chimney came to sort me out yesterday - prodding away until a hundred years of birds nests had been dislodged from my stack.
The fireplace and chimney which used to house a huge kitchen range, which heated the whole house, once more drew smoke which whispered and then bellowed from the top of my house.
Looks like I need to get some weed killer up there again!
Chimney sweeps are seeing a bit of a resurgence at the moment, what with the proliferation of wood burners and the need for a lucky hand shake at weddings. It's a messy job - chimneys, not weddings - but an interesting and lucky one.
We had a good old chat as he worked away clearing my blockages, and while he stopped short at adopting a 'Dick Van Dyke' comedy Cockanay accent and dancing round the room singing "Chim-chimaney, Chim-chimaney" he did let me feel his collar and shake his hand.....
"Good luck will rub off - when I shakes hands with you!"
So that's my marketing and PR campaign for the launch of 4Manchester Women sorted out then!
He was full of good stories - including one occasion where he was asked to clean a chimney in a room which had just been decorated. Not wanting him to attach his dust sheets to her new embossed wall paper, the owner asked if she could just hold the dust sheet in front of the fireplace, and he could rod between her legs. To which he replied:
"I'm not being funny love, but I don't think I'd fit!"
If you need a bit of rodding, then I'd really recommend Jimmy - for the entertainment as much as the service (oh er)!
Click here for Manchester Chimney Sweep.
This isn't a sponsored post - he was just a really nice bloke, who did a good rod-job!
