A small wood stove is our heat source for our horribly cold room.  There are drafts, holes and absolutely no insulation.  It is drywall, studs and then exterior brick.  Nothing to hold the heat in or keep the cold out.  One of the windows is broken with plastic taped over the holes.  Oh, and the ceiling is open to the rafters…

Last Winter was our first season in the room and our first time using wood heat.  We learned a lot in the process:

• We cut wood as we needed it instead of stockpiling.  This led to some shortages and some work in the dark as we scrambled for a night’s worth of wood.
• We didn’t have a damper in the stove pipe.  This led to most of the heat going up and out the chimney.  It also meant that we had to feed the fire every three hours.  I guess it was like having a newborn baby but with way more cussing and shivering.
• We didn’t have electricity run, so we didn’t have an overhead fan.  Heat went up and up and out.

So we fixed some things, and we are in a little different place this year.  First, we have a ceiling fan wired up.  It keeps the hot air down at our level and helps with heat distribution.

Second, I put a damper in the stove pipe.  This closes off the stove from the chimney, allowing the wood to burn longer  in the stove.  Since the stove is pretty old, it is not airtight.  Without the damper air is sucked through the openings in the stove, making the fire burn hotter and shorter.

Third, we started cutting and splitting wood when it warmer outside and not needed for burning.

Last night we fired up the stove for the first time this season.  We went through eight pieces of wood from six in the evening until morning, much less than our average last year and with no need to load it after we went to bed.  The fire kept the room very toasty all night long.  It was so warm that I slept on top of my sleeping bag.  Kristin felt is was uncomfortably hot under her covers.  This tells me that we might have figured out the formula to keep warm this year.

Trying to stop leaks on an old rotted house is an interesting process.  Figuring out where to start is also interesting in that I don’t really have much experience doing shingle roof repair.  I worked for a year doing tear-offs and replacement roofs on power plants and a Corning facility, but that did not prepare me to do flashing on chimneys or replace asphalt shingles.

It took me an entire day just to replace two sides of chimney flashing and repair the shingles that I had ripped up around it.  All the old flashing was just a pile of rust.  It was held together by layers of decaying silicone caulk and fragments of termite digested wood.  There was also a nice helping of orange spray sealant foam that served no purpose except to develop holes and hold water in those holes.

I had to use extra roofing tar just to fill in some of the brick joints.  I will mortar the rest of the chimney when I get a chance but just wanted to get the thing to stop leaking.

The other side was a horror show of four layers of shingles and a half dozen previous repair attempts.

This repair is anything but pretty but it is sealed and tight.

In new house news, we marked out the lines with our builder Malcolm Duff.

Hopefully the construction will start in a few weeks.