Light my fire

Oh, the mess around the stove is frightful, but the fire is so delightful. Burning wood is a messy business. Cleaning up after burning is, too. Every day after a fire, I have to empty the ashes by brushing them into the tray below the floor of the stove and taking that tray down to the utility room to empty it into a galvanized ash bucket. Tasha likes to bark at me when I do this. When the bucket gets full, I take it out back and dump it.

Grape vine trunks on the left and inside the stove, a couple of birch branches on the right.

Meanwhile, fine ash accumulates on surfaces. And not-so-fine ash and pieces of wood accumulate on the floor of the fireplace. I'm constantly sweeping and periodically vacuuming, but it never really seems clean until spring when I stop making fires. Burning wood helps us to not use so much heating oil, so that's a good thing. And the stove burns hot (it was called "double burning") so there's hardly any visible smoke going out the chimney.

This stove is fifteen years old. It's got some cracks inside (the body of the stove is fine and there's no smoke in the house) and the front grill (that pointy thing that keeps the logs inside when you open the door) is warped because of the heat. We've thought about replacing the stove with a wider model so we can burn bigger logs, but the company that made this one no longer exists. And we have other projects that we want to do first. So there we are.