When the weather is brisk (like today, when we woke to 12 degrees), nothing warms my heart (and toes) so much as this sight: a stack of dry wood beside a cozy fire in our soapstone wood stove. I could go on and on about this stove —about how it radiates heat for hours after the flames have simmered down, about how much I love its glossy brown enamel trim, and about how satisfying it is to fill it up and know that while it's burning, our furnace isn't. But I won't, now.
Now, I'll just say that we couldn't live without it. And the DRY wood stacked beside it has been hard-earned. The truth is, keeping the three cords of wood we burn each season dry without the help of a barn or garage or woodshed is not easy. That was, until Michael devised this ingenious solution for our side porch. We've stacked our seasoned wood here each fall for the past four years, only to have the water that overflowed from gutters above splatter all over it. So we covered it with brown tarps we cut to fit precisely. Only then, snow and ice piled on top of those, which made prying pieces out from under the petrified plastic cover a real pain.
Behold: Three pieces of rough-hewn hemlock supported by four-by-four beams, attached by leveraged notches and couple of bolts. This solution came to Michael after months of trying to site a charming woodshed close to the house on a bit of level ground, to no avail. This is even better. Snow and ice and water dribble away, and I can enjoy the lovely view of our beautifully constructed wood piles. And, of course, dry wood.
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Soapstone is WONDERFUL. It really does hold the heat and radiate it to the room in a very gentle manner. Our stove isn't a Hearthstone, but the really intense heat you often feel standing next to a metal stove is not present with soapstone. Sure, it's warmer close to it, but it's not blasting heat.
I doubt we'd have any other sort of stove ever again. It's that nice!
Posted by: Soapstone Woodstove | January 27, 2009 at 12:02 PM
I really enjoy my soapstone stove as well. how long have you had yours?
Posted by: soapstone | December 02, 2009 at 11:08 AM