gentleman burner

You're probably familiar with the term "gentleman farmer" -- someone who owns a farm and kind of doodles away at it in their spare time, more for fun and amusement than to make a living at it.

Well, in the same sense, we're gentlemen burners. We have a wood stove. When people say "Do you heat your house with wood?" we say no, we just supplement a little. We love running the wood stove. It's nice sitting by the fire. The stove provides a kind of warmth that we can't get out of the house's normal heating system. But it's often seemed worth running the stove only when we're home for extended periods -- weekends, or when one of us is laid up or laid off.

When I first bought the house, the stove was easy to start. You'd lay a fire -- arranging paper, kindling, a few small logs -- give it lots of air, light it, and boom, the fire was going. (Those years in the girl scouts had some benefit -- at least I learned to start fires!) Since the house addition has gone up, the winds have changed, and I mean that literally. Lighting the fire has become traumatic. Smoke billows throughout the house, the smoke alarms go off, the cats hide, and I want to crawl under the bed, if only I could fit. Robert has taken to heating the chimney first with a barbecue starter, and lately, a tiny welding torch. I've kind of given up on starting the fire, mostly because I can't easily reach the smoke alarms to disconnect them.

So just this week, I asked whether we might try keeping the fire going overnight and during the day. So far, so good. We started the stove up over the weekend. When we come downstairs in the morning, we stir up the coals, pop some wood on, open up the vents, and get instant flames again. When I come home from work, I rinse, lather, and repeat. A little more time has passed than for an overnight, so one night, I needed to restart the fire, but it caught right away. As long as the chimney is still warm to the touch, starting the fire is -er- a breeze.

This new strategy has meant bringing wood in every morning, but it's also meant that we've had a fire in the stove and that the downstairs is a little warmer in the evenings. The house feels emotionally warmer too, more welcoming. And given that we're having a tree taken down fairly soon, perhaps we'll even make more room on our wood pile for the cord (two? three?) that we're due to get in a proverbial, rather than (we hope) a literal, windfall.