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I keep thinking about the kitchen. What to do, how to get it done, costs. A kitchen is a huge project. If well designed, a kitchen is an amazing place. The heat needed for cooking is kept tamed, the air flow needed to cool or maintain heat is readily available, the floors and walls are safe, there is space for cooking and baking goods and consumables, there is plenty of easy access space for preparing food, and cleanup is simple and easy access. Designed poorly and the place is unsafe, uncomfortable, unsatisfactory, unpleasant, and any or all of those and more. My kitchen, plain and simple, is a nuisance. I have a huge space and yet no place to work at all. Beside making the kitchen useable, improvements would add value to the house as a whole.
Something else I keep looking at, wood fired cooking stoves, and this stove. They seem to indicate these can work as house heaters, too. But I am dubious about that. I love the looks of the second one, but the function of the first one a lot more. Oh, I remember my foster mother tending this to cook and bake when we were in the mountains, at their cabin. We also had a standard fireplace there. She had one like the prettier one, if not quite as fancy. She made it seem simple, but it wasn't. Adding wood at just the right time and adjusting vents to maintain a specific temp. Starting the fire then waiting while it heated. Cleaning out the dust was messy, if she made even that look easy. She had talent, though by the time I knew her she had nearly 20 years of (albeit just summer) practice with the contraption. A family uses 8 to 12 cords of wood a year (in the northern climbs). A cord, in Utah, if I saw correctly, goes for around $125, plus delivery. Or, a permit to collect is $7.50 a cord with a minimum of 4 cords per permit. That, of course, would require the tools to take lumber and the capacity to haul it. Ugh, never ending. There is another downside. You always smell like a smoker. Maybe things have improved, but I am doubting it. My first year up there I still smoked, yes, only a 7th grader, hushit. I could always find cigarettes, just... followed my nose and kept my eyes open, if pilfering was needed. Up there they never could tell I had been smoking.
I don't know, just something on my mind. Actually, if I was to do that, I would also consider a smaller but regular wood heater in the living room. I still haven't investigated the old fireplace here. Even if it isn't up to specs, it would probably still do just fine with an insert. An insert would be a lot more fuel efficient, too. The thing is, until I decide I can even afford to break into the drywall to check about the fireplace, I can't know if an insert will work. It depends on which way the fireplace opening is facing. The thing is, with all that, we are talking about $6k to $10k, just in purchase price. Taxes, delivery, installation, alterations... extra. Yeah. But it is on the backburner for when I win the lottery! Maybe I ought to start playing? Ha, one of the other good things about Utah? No lottery. It's an honest state. (And, no, I would not play the lotto even if it were here, nor should you. Even if you aren't into the whole morality thing, perhaps you should be into the whole math and economic thing? Doh!)
Some things to consider when considering updating my kitchen. Going forward is not always going... well... forward. You can keep your stainless appliances. You can keep your electric. You can keep dainty materials that won't hold up to an ogre chef. But that doesn't mean it will be cheap, either. Trading in flash for good quality means solid materials and workmanship, things that are more at a premium than ever.
Oh, sounds like my outside wood/coal oven and water pasteurizer are here. The delivery company called and asked for my physical address. That disappoints me a bit. The problem ordering, as I came to figure out, was that the address section would not take both of my addresses for my credit card to work. At first, when doing it, it looked like both were required, but only one was really needed. Taking a break from it allowed me to see the missing detail when I returned to try again. So, I took off my physical address. I noticed they had a place for "extra instructions". So, I wrote a brief simple note indicating that, should they not be using USPS (should I have spelled it out?), that they send it to my physical address, which I supplied. Well, no real bother unless I hadn't happened to be awake to receive the call. Remember now, for most of my twenty years of illness, when I happened to be awake, I was almost exclusively awake in the afternoons or even more so at night. Bah!
Hmm, come to think of it, that is quite a change. As recently as two years ago, I was almost always only awake at night. I still sometimes go through that, but it isn't the usual. Just... noticing things I guess. Oh, on the good side with the wood stove consideration... Since I am planning to upgrade the kitchen, I could add in special insulation so that I could have the stove more flush with the walls. Hmm, I keep thinking on it all.
Later.
That much wood would either heat a really large space, or be used up in a really inefficient stove.
ReplyDeleteYou could probably keep most of your house reasonably comfortable with 3 cords of quality hardwood per winter with a decently efficient stove. IIRC we got by with about 5-6 cords heating my parents 2700 sf house both upstairs and downstairs in the basement apartment through the worst Minnesota winters. 100% wood heat--the furnace never even had oil in the tank for years and years. And if we were trying to be frugal we could have gotten by with maybe 4 cords and sweaters.
You could heat with that cookstove no problem, but I would probably get a smallish airtight secondary combustion style woodstove to install in a different part of the house for heating after the cooking is done. More efficient that way because cookstoves are never airtight by design.
Yeah, that was sort of what I was hoping to learn more about. Simply put, it is impossible to know unless you truly lived with those things, and so few have. The Amish, you, perhaps a few others. But it just isn't that common. Even my experience is rather uncommon and that was very part time for four years. It is (usually) far warmer here in my part of northern Utah than Minnesota, too. Iowa was like Minnesota though, I know that bitter cold. We had 45 days where the high was -20 F, not so long ago. The high, mind you. I love these mild Utah winters, to be honest. I've only seen -20 a few times, it was rather normal, common, in Iowa. If I want colder though, 20 miles in any direction, then up, and I can probably find -80 F or more on certain nights.
ReplyDeleteMy house is 2,500-2,800, but with the stone main part and very well insulated/built additions, it holds heat quite well (once heated). And, all but a small 'stone surround' upstairs is on one level. I really lucked into the right type of structure for this wood heating.
You know though, a wood stove and cold winters induce women to want to cook. I don't need the heat, literally. I can handle cold right down to the bone so long as I have shelter. Women (all I have met so far) NEED warmth. Most have easily gotten by with just me in the room and no other heat source while sleeping, but we can't sleep forever. But finding a woman who will put up with wood cook stoves before it is obviously (to them) needed is a whole other trick. They like it simple, easy, and automatic. They are used to easy. SHTF is going to be a real eye-opener for most women.