The good news is a couple of warm (ish) days in the offing. The not-so-good news is, that although at least the factory did not condemn the wood boiler, it will take around six weeks for them to get it repaired.
Maybe more.
Hopefully less.
(It is in Wisconsin now. If any of you live there and happen to see it, tell it hi for me and that I miss it.)
Six weeks ain't much in the grand scheme of things except when it is six weeks of November and December in the Northeast. Then the death of the oil burner becomes a bit of a crisis.
Only to us though. The boss has spent hours on the phone trying to track down a new firebox for the old wreck to little avail. Everyone wants to sell us a new furnace. Yep got those thousands of bucks sitting right here. Hard enough to find the cash to pay for repairs to the wood boiler, but dang, how are we going to do it twice!
Little brother had a thought. We have a small propane furnace in another location. Might could be that it can be installed in our living room or somewhere to hold off just the actual freezing thing for the next few weeks. Kind of hard to pursue it on the weekend but it is high on the agenda for next week.
Meanwhile, I have been reminded that I have been cold before. It is more comfortable to forget moving to an ancient farm house when I was 8 and heating with antique coal stoves. We were never warm, but we survived. I can remember huddling next to the stove in near darkness (lord only knows why we didn't have good lights, but it seemed like it was always dark there) reading and putting off going to bed in those icy upstairs bedrooms.
Then moving to my grandparents summer camp in January. Unheated. Sticking a stove pipe out the window for a little sheet metal stove designed to heat maybe a shoe box. "Burning" wet, dripping wood. (Burning is a euphemism for striking a lot of matches and trying to light the paper under the pile of soggy junk then watching it steam while we froze.) That was the cold of despair. I have never been so cold. I didn't know then how to get warm without proper heat.
That is when I learned to really build a fire though. When we bought the wood boiler the man who installed it was astonished how fast I got it up to operating temperature. Heck I had dry wood.
Anyhow, we are getting by. It stinks to be this cold and I fear for my house plants, but we are surviving. And it's warm in the barn.
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9 comments:
I wish there was something we could do to help....sucks being a thousand miles away from friends and family.
Well, whatever y'end up doing, don't poison yourselves while you're trying to get warm!
When I was little seems like heating in the winter was sufficient only to keep the blood flowing. Kerosene stove in the kitchen, the other downstairs rooms closed off, grates to the upstairs...and LOTS of cotton batting quilts.
Boy did we sleep well, though!
Cold.
I'm looking at the word.
Cold.
Don't like it.
Don't like you battling it.
Tent camping in the winter Rockies was our only real experience of cold.
Did it once.
Didn't like it.
Why is the barn warm?
You could make a catnip-stuffed quilt and invite all your barn cats indoors. At least your bed would be warm, even if you couldn't sleep with all those paws kneading the covers. Joking aside, I hope you find a way to keep warm and avoid frozen pipes. Does your hot-water heater still work, or did you heat water with your wood furnace? How about your kitchen range? Time to make lots of soups and stews that require long cooking.
You brought back memories of the warm morning heater and Mom thawing frozen sheets next to it and me once backing up and burning my cheeks....then cow camp where we would sit by the wood cook stove on rainy cold days.
Still that was then and you have now...fingers crossed that you get heat back into the house long before six weeks
Linda
http://coloradofarmlife.wordpress.com
http://deltacountyhistoricalsociety.wordpress.com
You probably can't count on man made global warming to be much help. Could you bring in some of those flatulent cows to add heat?
Do you have a propane line handy in the house? I heat my old hundred year old hovel with a blue flame heater - probably a 30,000 btu job. Not supposed to run it inside without ventilation, but considering how poorly sealed the ol' joint is anymore, that really isn't a problem. Those heaters are usually around $150 to $200 or so - keep one big room nice'n toasty and the rest comfortable.
Of course, my place can't be over 1200 or so sq feet and all the bedrooms are shut off.
Dani, thank you kind friend. Hope things are going better for you and your family
June, I am going to try to make sure of that. I am very sensitive to bad air from breathing so much from kerosene heaters when I was a kid
Cathy,thinking back on my life I have been cold so much. I hate it too. Getting used to it in some ways though. It was seventy in the milk house due to the compressor being on and I thought I would faint from the heat.
WW, wonder if I could get a cat to curl up around each of my house plants and cuddle them....I have had some of them since I was a teenager. Kind of hate to lose them. You are spot on about cooking. Been baking corn bread, making spaghetti sauce, anything to steam up the place a little.
LInda, I miss wood heat so much. I could always coax some kind of warm out of the stove even if the boss was in a snit and wouldn't bring me wood. I have burned up dead branches from acres around, old wood pallets, every scrap of old fence etc. from all over the place, but now I feel kinda helpless.
Jeffro, we do! We also have a small propane furnace in a camp. Hasn't been used in years, but we are thinking about getting it serviced and installed somewhere down here. We are okay as long as the weather stays like this, not comfortable, but okay, but it is going to get a lot colder and probably pretty soon. We have most of the house shut off too, just heat four rooms and the bath.
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