At the end of last winter, Huckleberry tore apart the air pipe that channels heat from our exterior wood furnace into the trailer.  Then the stove pipe rusted out.  We were trying to hold off on lighting our wood stove until the end of the week when we would hopefully have the floor of the shed up and could just move the stove there, rather than fixing it in its current location.

All weekend, I shivered in a house that barely reached 50 degrees, baking large dinners to warm up the kitchen.  Mark had a space heater in his room, but I didn't want to break down and use electricity.  Finally, Monday morning, the interior temperatures were in the thirties.  Yikes!

So sweet Mark threw together some short-term fixes on the wood stove and lit us a fire.  By mid morning, I took off my winter coat, sweater, gloves, and second pair of pants.  Ah, wood heat!

As a side note, you can see that our wood shed is already halfway full.  It looks like we may run out of space before we run out of wood and will have to build a second shed.  A good problem to have!

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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