Happy Winter Solstice!
It was a brisk 43 degrees inside still gutted house (25 outside) when I slipped out out of our porch tent to build the fire before Mr. Awesome woke up…
This beauty is a Sierra Woodstove TEC-8000. It is a hearth stove meaning it is a freestanding stove that is narrow enough to sit on the fireplace hearth, in front of the fireplace. It vents through the fireplace, but the rest of the fire place is covered by a heat shield. This rather blurry photo was taken immediately after install before the first fire.
We chose this model over an insert because the hearth stove radiates heat into the room, while an insert requires an electric fan to get the heat out of the insert. We ordered the stove about a month ago and it was installed last Thursday. Sierra Woodstove is a very small company in Nevada and they build each stove on order. I’ll cover the installation in my next post.
Mr. Awesome has been the main fire builder and has gotten quite good, even with the cold morning stove. This morning, however, was my first attempt. I had a vision of building a most excellent fire that would have the living room warm before Mr. Awesome woke up (I was trying to be nice). but that didn’t work out. While I did manage to get a fire going after about an hour, it was a pretty meager fire that only succeeding in raising the temperature to 45 by the time Mr. Awesome woke up. Given we intend to heat the house solely with wood, I’ll have plenty more opportunities to get it right. In the meantime, I’ll read a few article about building a proper fire. Apparently, top down is the preferred method for a wood stove fire.
In other news, Mr. Awesome has been working on the bathroom. We have walls! and he built a beautiful vanity using the photos below as inspiration. Sorry, he will not let me show the actual vanity until it is completely finished. I love that I can tell him, I want X and he can build it. In this case, I said here’s your inspiration, don’t make it so rough I get splinters, but it definitely should be rustic.I can’t wait to show you how awesome it is!
The bathroom build has reached a point where nothing else can be done without warmer temperatures, so Mr. Awesome has moved on to installing the electrical. Once the electrical is in (likely before Christmas Day) we’ll be able to insulate the house and hang some drywall to retain more of that awesome wood stove heat. We assume that with insulated exterior walls, we’ll be able to maintain temperatures in the higher 70s inside given how good the stove works now, without the insulation.
The Happy Pig 