The Wood Stove

We have heated exclusively with wood for the entire time we have lived in the North Carolina (almost 15 years). I love the radiant heat from a wood stove and really like cutting, splitting, and hauling wood. The fact that it seems to be one of the few ways of sticking it to the man by avoiding payment for heat every month serves to make it all the sweeter. (Warning, dealing with the cutting and splitting and hauling and the dirt and inconvenience of wood heat is not for everyone; many people hate it.) So it was a given that we would install a wood stove in the new house. Being a cheapskate, I saw no reason not to move our old Squire woodstove with us when we moved; it had served us well for all these years, held big logs and put out a lot of heat in return, and best of all, it was paid for.

I guess I should not have been surprised when the county building inspectors started giving me trouble over the idea; that's their job right? Maybe it is different in other places, but here, in Orange County NC, if you are going to install a woodstove it has to either be certified by some organization or else have an installation book that shows the manufacturer's requirements for setbacks, stove-piping, surrounding surface requirements, etc. Since I had bought my old woodstove on Craig'slist 15 years earlier and had no documentation (and the manufacturer was apparently no longer in business) I was informed that "sure, no problem" and then they read me a list of things I had to do, including building a 16" thick layer of stone covered by a 1/2" steel plate underneath the stove and extending 4' in every direction. I would also have to build a brick wall behind the stove and leave a 4" wide opening between the brick wall and the existing wall behind it. In other words, they would allow it to be installed but only if I tore the house down and rebuilt it since the layer of stone I had to place in the middle of my living room would weigh more than 10,000 pounds, which the framing would not hold. The funny thing about all that stuff that had to go under the stove to keep it from burning through the floor is that I currently have the stove installed on top of a tile floor and have placed my hand underneath it, after burning the stove for several hours, and the tile it still ice cold, not even slightly warm. That it because in this universe heat always goes up, which is apparently not the case in the universe the Orange County building department works in (or maybe they thought I was going to burn plutonium fuel in the thing.


At any rate, a new woodstove was in our future. I had paid $300 for my last stove and $500 for the one before that, so when I saw prices running $3000 to $10,000 I suffered a bit of sticker shock. I had put $5000 in the budget for a new stove when we applied for the construction loan and so that was about our limit.












Ultimately, we found a nice stove that fit the budget and I had a crew install it. The weather had been unseasonably warm and it seemed that we might not get to even fire it up until next winter, but we finally had a few cool nights that would allow a fire and it performed better than I even expected. The 25' tall stovepipe makes the stove draw exceedingly well and getting a fire going is very easy.


We are starting a new 8' x 24' woodshed this week and by next winter all of our wood should be dry and ready to burn. I think that between the house's solar features and this new stove we should rarely have to use the heat pumps, so once more I will be laughing while I stick it to the man (Duke Energy).

Update: December 2012

Loving this stove! Easy to light, draws well, and pumps out the heat. Glad we made the upgrade. Not sure though why all stove fans have to be so loud! This thing puts out so much heat that the ceiling fan you see above it turns pretty fast just from the rising heat. Coldest temps we have seen so far are about 25 degrees, so the proof will be one of those 8 degree nights, but so far it looks like this stove will come pretty close to being able to heat the house. If there is a single downside, it would be the much-smaller firebox than what I was used to. Can't really stuff in any wood longer than about 16" and have to split it much small than for my previous stove, but am still happy with the performance.

Finishing Up

There came a time in the project when I decided that my trim carpenter was actually doing more harm than good while every week I was still having to pay him. I assessed what work remained and decided that there was really nothing left that I could not complete myself. It had become apparent earlier that he really was no craftsman at all and while he certainly had much more carpentry experience than I have, his lack of attention to detail and his refusal to listen to my direction more than made up for any difference in our relative levels of experience. On the other hand, while I have much more limited experience when working with wood than with metal (long ago I completed and 4-year machinist apprenticeship and was employed for several years as a journeyman machinist), I will take the time to do things right. I might not be as productive, but in the end I will definitely have the final product quality that I want.

One major oversight I had made was to grossly underestimate the amount of finish carpentry work that is required in a house of this size. When I took over the carpentry task the deck, door and window trim, kitchen cabinetry, flooring, and some of the decorative trim were complete, leaving baseboards, pantry, closets, built-ins, and a lot of little odds and ends to finish up. This house has 13 closets and most of them required 4-5 shelves each, at a minimum.

Early on in the project we had looked at shelving options and had agreed that neither of us much cared for the ever-so-popular wire shelving, which is about all you can find in the big box stores. We opted instead for some form of solid wooden shelving and I decided that in most cases I would use poplar lumber and laminate a one inch thick oak strip on the front edge of each shelf for a more finished look.

When I had initially cleared the lot 5 years earlier I had milled several of the large trees that had stood on the site into lumber and those boards had been drying ever since in my pole barn. Using that rough-sawn lumber to make shelving was by far the most labor-intensive way to make shelving, but for me it would also be the most satisfying; and after all, I really had taken on this project for the joy of doing it as much as for the final product.

So the process would be to cut the boards to length, plane them to thickness, joint the edges, laminate several of them togther to obtain the desired overall width, trim them to finish size, prime them for paint, and apply the final coats of paint. Then I would take rough oak lumber, cut, plane, and joint them, round over the edges, and stain and finish the pieces. These finished trim pieces would then be laminated to the front edge of each shelf. I could then prepare the shelf supports (requiring basically the same set of steps), fit them and nail them in place, and then install the shelving. While this was a long and involved set of steps, I was no stranger to assembly line work and kind of looked forward to the whole thing. The big issue was that I was building the shelving at the same time as we were moving and we needed to have the shelving in place before we could unpack. This was also spring, which meant that I had fields to prepare and crops to plant and tend, so prioritizing the work was essential.

We had planned on installing mirrored closet doors on the his and hers master bedroom closets and had ordered them in plenty of time to have them onsite while my finish carpenter was still with me. I had special ordered them through Lowes and even with the 4-6 week lead time we should have been fine. But when they arrived they were mirrored doors with no mirrored surfaces. Yep, the Lowes guy had apparently ordered them that way. We already had the frames installed by the time we noticed so I figured we could reorder them and then when they arrived, return the new frames and not have to remove the old ones. The Lowes guy agreed. Apparently though the Lowes accounting department did not agree and two weeks later cancelled our order. So I tore the frames out and returned them and reordered a third time. By time they finally arrived my carpenter was long gone so Mario and I installed them and they looked good.