Insurance Company requires Professional Install for New Wood Stove

Our stove installation took a turn off-road that has indefinitely postponed this installation. The Chimney Sweep told me the current chimney isn't usable without some significant repair/replacement. Funny how our home inspection when we purchased the home in '93 never mentioned any problems with the chimney (I know that most home inspections are a joke, required and somewhat expensive but useless). I had never been to the rooftop to inspect the chimney as I didn't really need to know until now, after all it passed the home inspection right? Apparently at some point our masonry chimney had been removed down to the roof line and roofed over, later on someone decided to re-open the chimney and built a chase style chimney above the roof line and lined the entire chimney masonry portion and wooden chase portion with 2 single wall masonry liners for the entire height, the second one was for an old furnace vent at some point. So I need to recreate the missing 5' to 6' masonry chimney and reline it with a modern liner; or remove the existing ancient chimney for the full depth and install a new modern chimney in the same location . . . . . . err that is have my professional installer do this . . . either way it's more than I want to get into at this time and the removal and replacement is really what needs to happen as this old chimney really needs to go for other long term (100+ years) structural reasons. If I could have made it work safely for a few hundred dollars we would have done it now, even though it will be removed later on when we remodel the entire downstairs. As is, we'll wait and do it right later on. A 30% tax credit would have saved some cash but I'd have much more than that in my short term fix, much much more than that in my long term replacement. It's just not meant to be at this time as we are operating on 2/3 of "normal" income with wife out of work. I have no doubt we could make it pay for itself, but don't want to spend any of our rainy day fund to make this happen now.
In the course of my recent wood burning re-education I did purchase a Jotul Nordic to install in our small camping cabin I can still get my wood heat fix satisfied once I install that stove. Maybe when we eventually resurrect the home remodeling/stove project, Woodstock will have their new Fireview in production, it may be worth waiting for anyway! Thanks for the advice and insurance company sympathy. Too bad the previous owner didn't have my insurance company! He sure could have used a professional!

Dave

My chimney sweep . . . (although I don't think he will be my sweep next time I need one, lets just say he didn't impress my wife in person, nor me on the phone) . . . . said he thought the unit had to be installed by the end of the year, of course he doesn't sell stoves so all his cash is from inspections and guess what . . . installations! However my little nightmare was more than he wanted to take on.
I'm sort of curious about the New design of the fireview. Those were among the first stoves I ruled out, but over the course of a month or so lurking here, for the way I want the stove to function (long and low burns) in my small house with the firebox size I think I need, they are likely my final conclusion. I was seriously considering a Jotul Oslo just to get the bigger firebox, but I think the Fireview with its soapstone walls and its darned ol' complicated stick-shift and clutch cat mechanism was a better choice for us, especially when you factor in what you can save from their current sale and the tax credit!

Hmmmm at least I know what length my firewood needs to be, I guess its time to start that woodshed project and laying up my wood now, I've got a white oak tree that was ripped down in a tornado-ish wind last spring, it fell on several smallish trees and between a few of its limbs and the trees beneath it, it's almost like I bucked it off the ground. It's about 6' in dia and about 75' tall/long. Time to get to work, by the time I get around to fixing my house/stove it'll be about perfect to burn.