When my wife and I bought our family home several years ago it was the kitchen that sold us. It was a quaint ‘70s style kitchen with multi-coloured cupboard doors and horribly patterned linoleum on the floor.
Not convinced yet? Nor were we.
Not until we turned around and saw the other side of the room. There it was – what we always wanted - a large brick chimney climbing up through the ceiling with an Oregon pine shelf above it and then below, the drawcard for us,
a No. 2 Rayburn Stove!
We had always admired the traditional country style homes and had fantasised about owning an old fashioned wood fuelled stove just like this. And there it was.
So we bought the house, moved in and lived like country folk. The only problem we soon faced was that this old Rayburn was our only source of heating and cooking. There was no other modern stove or oven. After a few months we realised that this lovely old stove under our rustic brick chimney was really difficult to cook on, as well as being an inconvenient method of heating our home. Even boiling the kettle was an issue. If the stove went out there was no cup of tea!
Later, as our first child arrived, we decided to connect gas to the house and install a modern gas oven and stove top. This was great! Finally we no longer had to guess what temperature the oven was at. Finally the food tasted good and the scones were not burnt.
Sometime later, as generally happens, child two and then child three soon arrived on the scene. In what seemed like overnight, our small two bedroom cottage with our lovely old chimney became far too small for our growing family.
Renovations … time to call in some carpentry wisdom from the father-in-law. We moved the front door and built a wall, which created a third bedroom and a small sun-room at the front. We then built two big rooms off the back of the house, giving us a large lounge and dining room as well as a nice master bedroom. Eventually we moved my office into a corner somewhere and converted it into another bedroom. So all in all, plenty of space for our growing family plus room for guests.
I suppose this is only the natural progression of things. You start small, and as children and waistlines increase, so do your expenses, and so does the amount of room you need to accommodate.
As in any part of life, as our capacity increases so does our ability to handle greater responsibilities, make greater profit, and take on more opportunities. The more our capacity grows, the bigger our life becomes. Or, the bigger we get the more space we need to continue living a full life.
Let me explain 'capacity' with the following example. What is difficult to someone many years younger than me, I find easy. And what is difficult to me, someone much older than me can do with their eyes closed. Therefore my level of capacity is greater than the younger person, but lesser than the older person, in this example. What I found difficult ten years ago I now find a breeze, and hopefully in another ten years what I struggle with now will seem easy.
Back to my ever-expanding family home, with growing children and increasing collections of ...collections. The rest of the house had expanded with us, but the old style kitchen had remained the same. It was now too small. We needed more kitchen space, and the lovely old wood fuelled Rayburn stove had not been alight for some years.
What was once lovely, ideal and perfect for our life had now become a burden and an inconvenience. A remnant from our past that was still taking up space in our life today.
Finally we bit the bullet and gave the green light to remove the stove. Our chimney was removed and the old Rayburn stove is now sitting amongst a pile of chimney bricks around the back of our house. We loved this old stove and our lovely brick chimney, but we had moved on and it had stayed put.
As I sit in our kitchen writing this story I look around, amazed at how much more space we now have. It is plenty of space for us, our family and our life. And all it took was to remove a once loved stove and chimney. Something from our past that was once a blessing had become a burden and in order to continue moving forward this object had to be removed.
I wonder is there a chimney in your life that must be removed before you can move forward? | 
