The Great Woodstove Adventure

As the saying goes, 'Where there's smoke, there's a fire!"

Let me regale you with The Great Woodstove Adventure:

We got all the remaining parts and tools in on Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and my pyromaniac hubby decided that he simply HAD to put it all together and get it working after church that night...of course he did...so he started messing with it while I got some preliminary Thanksgiving cooking out of the way: cranberry sauce, biscuits and cornbread to go in the dressing, jello salad, etc. I try to do some of the baking, like pies and fresh sweet potatoes, the night before to make the next day just a smidgen less hectic. It makes it much easier to get the other dishes ready to slide into the oven as soon as the bird comes out if I don't have to juggle pies or components of the finished dishes (like the cornbread) too.

I could hear the scraping of the pipe as it was put together and drilling sounds emanating from the living room while I puttered around the kitchen for a couple of hours. I decided that I was tired and poked my head in the living room before heading upstairs. My dear husband, with a gleeful expression, was still intently working on getting everything lined up with the chimney. He was so cute, he looked like a little boy with a new toy. In retrospect, this observation may not be so far off...what's that saying? "The only difference between men and boys is the price of their toys?" Something like that.

So, my husband was still tinkering with the thing when I went to bed around 11:45 p.m., only to be awakened about 20 minutes later to the unfamiliar, insistent screeching of the upstairs smoke alarm and a terrible chemical smell. I turned on my bedside lamp and saw that my room was full of smoke, yelped (yes, I yelped), and in my still-half-asleep state was poised to dash across the hall, snatch my daughter out of her room, and do something dramatic like dive through the second-story window, letting my body cushion her fall -- when my husband ran by the foot of the stairs and yelled that everything was OK, there was no fire in the house it was just the stovepipe. Just the stovepipe? How was metal on fire? What?

I blinked a couple of times, just to wake up fully, coughed, and made my way down the (smoky) stairs to find out what in tarnation was going on. The issue was a simple one, apparently, but us being woodstove newbies didn't know all the subtle nuances of the art of the woodstove. Or, apparently, its pipes. It would seem that brand new stovepipe has a coating on it that is supposed to come off, yes, but my hubby (did I mention that he's a pyro?) built the hottest fire he could (of course he did) and as a result, ALL of the stovepipe coating came off...at once. And because it was external coating, all that smoke and fumes had no way to get out through the chimney, so it filled the house instead.

I will say, that stove puts off some heat! We had the front door wide open, letting the 36 degree air (and windchill in the 20's) pour in -- and our thermostat (located on the wall at the foot of the stairs by the door) still read 79 degrees. A few stragetically placed fans and open windows later, our house was smoke- and stench-free. My husband decided he was sleeping on the couch, just to keep an eye on things and make sure nothing bad happened. His choice, mind, I don't make my husband sleep on the couch if I'm upset with him -- and I wasn't really upset with him, just exasperated and wondering why this couldn't have waited for daylight the next day...but what was done was done and there was no use getting mad if I'd wanted to.

*cough*

So, it's up and running, really isn't that difficult to use, and heats our house better than the oil furnace-driven central heat did! The downstairs heated nicely with the central heat, but the vents upstairs were always anemic and our room was always freezing. Plus, we never raised the thermostat above 64ish in the winter just to keep the costs down (we were spending about $3,000 on heat last year).

Not any more! Thanks to the woodstove, the whole house stays between 71 and 74, upstairs stays about 69. That little woodstove heats the upstairs better than the "superior" central heating system did! Now we just have to figure out the best positions for the draft and air intake, to let it burn as long as it can overnight.

The only hassle with the thing is that it tends to burn down after about 3 or 4 hours. This is no biggie during the day, I just chuck a log on there every couple of hours or so...but we have to stoke the fire and rebuild it if we get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. This is easy if there are a lot of hot coals, it takes like 5 minutes to get a roaring fire again and is no big deal. My Girl Scout camping trips are paying off. But. It's frustrating if there aren't any coals to speak of, it's 3:00 in the morning, and you have to coax a new fire to start from scratch and the tinder refuses to stay lit, so you don't get back to bed for a half-hour. Like this morning.

Since we're still new to the whole process, we are just going to have to learn the idiosyncracies of this particular stove to get it right, and hopefully we won't have any more evil glaring at the stove in the wee hours of the morning.

Here's to a new adventure! May we stay warm and toasty without becoming crispy critters. Laura Ingalls Wilder could do it, so I should be able to do it, right?