THE COTTAGE MYSTERY SERIES

White brick fireplace with a wood mantel and black stove in the sitting room of The Cottage at Foxhavens. — For a time, there was nothing about this fireplace that made us question what might be hidden within it.

“Every mystery begins with noticing something that doesn’t quite make sense.”

When we first began caring for the cottage, we spent a great deal of time simply looking.

The more time we spent with the house, the more familiar its details became. The shape of the roofline. The placement of the windows. The rhythm of the rooms. Slowly, the cottage stopped feeling unfamiliar and began to feel like a place we truly knew. Or so we thought.

One afternoon, while looking at the roof, something caught our attention.

The chimney.

More specifically…

Two chimney caps.

At first, it didn’t seem unusual. Plenty of older homes have more than one chimney, but ours doesn’t.

So why were there two chimney caps?

We searched through the house but found only the fireplace in the sitting room—the one we’d always known was there. There was no sign of another fireplace anywhere in the cottage. Nothing that explained why a single chimney appeared to serve two separate openings.

Maybe there had once been another fireplace that was later removed. Maybe something had changed during an earlier renovation. Or maybe there was an explanation we simply hadn’t discovered yet.

For weeks, we had no answer.

Then came an ordinary chimney inspection. Like many new homeowners, we scheduled it simply to make sure everything was safe before using the fireplace.

We expected a straightforward report.

Instead, the inspector mentioned something we weren’t expecting.

Inside the chimney, there were two flues. Two separate flues running through the same brick chimney. But instead of answers, we had more questions.

If there was only one fireplace… why would the cottage have two flues?

Suddenly, those two chimney caps weren’t simply a curious detail on the roof. They were the first clue that the cottage still had stories it hadn’t finished telling.

Old houses rarely reveal their history all at once. Sometimes they begin with a single observation.

Something you’ve walked past dozens of times without noticing. Looking back, it’s hard not to smile.

The first clue wasn’t hidden inside a wall.

It wasn’t buried beneath old floorboards.

It wasn’t tucked away in an attic.

It had been sitting right above our heads all along.

We didn’t know it then, but figuring out the purpose of that second flue would eventually lead us much deeper into the cottage’s history than we ever expected.

We had a feeling that the answer was somewhere inside the house, quietly waiting for us to notice.

Until next time,