Well this weekend will be a busy one.

The new stove addition is requiring a little auxiliary building. Fire needs fuel... This one needs nice DRY wood; DRY being the operative. So there is a little plan sitting on my dining room table for a 4' eave extension on the garage. THe idea is to build 3 Corbels (like those that I will eventually be adding to the eaves of the house) to support the over hang so it will not require posts. I want to keep the roof feeling light. The back yard will start to feel too small if there are all these structures eating into the ground space.

I will scan in the drawings just for fun... they are on notebook paper. I want to make this element match the house, so I'm hoping that the contractors have some cedar shingles left over from the siding for me to fill in the small space above the bracket.

I am going to take some process pics of this so y'all can see how far I can get in one weekend (seeing as how I work on Saturday until 4!! Boooo!)

check back!

Sunbeams cutting through the smoke from our break-in fire

Sunbeams cutting through the smoke from our break-in fire
Originally uploaded by turbofan

So if you could hear a chorus of angels singing as this sunbeam passes the woodstove, that would just about sum up how I am feeling about it today... now if we could only get some dry wood on hand to burn...

Will admiring the stove

Will admiring the stove
Originally uploaded by turbofan

Nice, warm, bright... so different from the cold, dark, useless hole that once occupied this room.

Once upon a time this was a woodburning fireplace... sometime in the 80's or 90's it was converted to a gas log... we all know what happened to the price of gas... Anyway. Not we have a high efficiency Jotul F3CB partially recessed into the opening. It looks Fantastic!! and works like a dream.

Funny story about the gas log and our gas bill... ha ha. Before we bought this place a 'special' woman from Texas was trying to flip it. Not having much experience with a furnace, she opted to try to heat the house with the old gas log in the fireplace... that explains why our bill shows December of 2006 with a $600 gas bill. As a side note, she also painted all of the SOLID OAK WOODWORK white... with exterior grade enamel... more on that as it comes off. Until then I'm happy in the warm glow of the fire :)

Second Beginning

I came upon a junction where my path diverged in the wood... and I just HAD to take the path less traveled. Now I know why no one used it... I web was a pain in the butt to blog with. It was very pretty, but limited me to using my home computer.. the one in the cold upstairs bedroom. So I am officially starting on blogger after having a fair amount of success using it for work. If you want to see the old entries go look at www.laughingwatertile.com I'll keep it open... since it's already there.

But on to the new.

Last Thursday the woodstove guy came to install the Jotul F3CB I have been lusting over for the past year or so.

I'm currently sitting in the glow of a 500 degree heat machine. The cat is passed out in heat-induced bliss next to me and Ryan is playing Risk on his I-phone at the other end of the couch. The past three days we have heated the place exclusively with the woodstove. Awesome.

Pictures to follow, as soon as I figure out how to link Flickr to Blogger.. this warmth is making me lazy (lazier)