"What is it?" you ask.
The wood burning stove in our basement!
Previously, we barely used the stove. . .
Mainly because the wood from the two trees we cut down in the summer of 2009 needed to season. And to be honest, I didn't think that we got much heat from it.
This year, though, I wanted to use it more in an attempt to keep our electric bill down. I DO NOT want $400 electric bills this winter!!! Yes, that is the frugal side of me. . .
After a night of being cold despite burning wood (and some smoky moments in our basement), MBB started investigating whether we had a bird's nest blocking our chimney or if there was anything else deciding that the smoke was our guest and needed to stick around.
What he found was a huge need for us to replace the fireplace's piping (safety is pretty important when it comes to fire!) and clean out as much of the fireplace / chimney as possible.
It was an all day affair and you wouldn't believe some of the stuff that we found when we pulled the stove out of the chimney.
Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures of OB or MBB inside the chimney. . . :(
MBB did figure out during his search for bird's nests that our chimney was built in thirds. . .
We have one wood burning stove and one fireplace in the living room that does not have a stove.
Threeeeeeeeee???
He also found a hole in the chimney in my craft room (not in a fireplace area!!!) that was letting in LOTS of cold air.
Yep, we are burning wood to warm the house and there is a hole letting cold air in!
A cap on the hole stopped the cold air, the pipes were replaced and suddenly, there was smoke coming out of our chimney. . .Success!
I'm realizing that this post is getting really long, so I'll shorten the story very quickly to say that later that night, I found another hole inside the living room chimney (remember the THREE chimney sections???). We quickly got that one covered to and you wouldn't believe how WARM our house has become from using the wood burning stove!
You might have noticed that the title of this post was "Making US Happy", but I was talking about our stove making ME happy.
Well, there is a new toy in our house that has made MBB happy as he doesn't have to get as many blisters on his hands while chopping big logs into small logs.
This is the non-frugal side of us coming out. . .We bought it brand new, BUT with a coupon!! lol
Introducing our log splitter.
The only bad thing. . .The logs have to be pretty short to fit in it. :(
Namaste.
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