Our house, being an older house, means it has a small chimney that may have possibly been used with some type of coal burning furnace.  As with all chimneys, this one has a cleanout, which is a small door placed at the bottom.  I am too curious just to leave well enough alone, so I have to open the door and see what is inside.

Chimney cleanout full of ash and dirt

As the picture shows, it is packed full of dirt and ash.  With no idea how much of what was inside the chimney,  I started to dig.  Using a small dust pan I kept digging and shoveling stuff out of the cleanout.  Sadly though, we can not find any pictures of the pile we ended up with.  We can however tell you that the pile was around 2 feet in diameter and all the way up to the bottom of the cleanout door.  We found ash, dirt, leaves, cut up pieces of metal chimney flue pipe (probably from when they installed the metal flue liner, since it’s not their problem that it’s in there) and a screw box from Whitney Screw Corporation which stopped production somewhere in the late 80’s.  We are curious as to how long that empty screw box has been down there.  Now that the pointless cleaning out of the chimney has been done, we should not have to do that again anytime soon (or ever).