The Mobile Home Woman

If you’ve been following along with our little saga… you know that the last two winters have been fairly unpleasant and cold for us!   Primarily because our main heating sources have been jinxed!  Yes, I’m pretty sure that is what you can call it.  Jinxed.   The first year we found out that the furnace was dead after a good deal of fumbling around.  Okay, then we got the corn pellet stove.  Really like that, but the darn thing caught on fire and tried to burn down our house!  (Poor curtains)  So, we limped through the rest of that winter on space heaters and kerosene heaters.  Not what I would recommend for your budget!

Then we got a friend to help us install a new furnace!  Yah!   But then we had all these problems with the propane tank, and ended up having to get another tank and just go through a heck of a time.   And then we found out that the new furnace is way underpowered for our house size and couldn’t get the house much past 60 on a warm day.  Oh no!  Too far gone to exchange it, so we came to a compromise…   we would add an additional form of heat, in a big wood furnace!  We got the furnace and installation free, as a bit of compensation because of the propane furnace and all we had to do was buy the exhaust pipe.  Not a bad deal, really, since those wood furnaces are easily a grand.   Our fellow, whom the girls are calling Calcifer after some game character they like (a little fire critter thingy)  is used, but he is in good shape and ready to make some heat for us.

We had a lot of seasoned stumps from a couple trees that we cut first year, so with a lot of help, a borrowed log splitter and the ponies, we got nearly a full cord of wood ready and waiting for the installation of our beast.

Mark and his son were out last Saturday and we had all the parts ready after Jr. took out that window and helped put up the fireboard behind the spot that Calcifer will be sitting.  It didn’t take too long, a few hours, to get it all installed and set up.

Lots of parts and tools and all that.   The nice thing is that the only part that requires electricity is the blowers on the back.   It can be run without electricity, just have to be careful not to overheat the box and run it with a HUGE roaring fire in there.   Like if the power goes out.  That is one cool part to the puzzle.   Being rural, we are the first to be sacrificed when the big cities need power.  And if a storm comes through, we are the last to be hooked back up.  So we need a heat source for just in case!  And Calcifer will fill the bill.   Of course, he’s much more efficient with his fans running.

Just in time…  a very cold mass of air came in after that storm and made it rainy and foggy, even with snow flurries.  We were very very very ready for some decent heat.

I was never so happy to see a fire in my house!  The girls tolerate the cool house much more than this old lady!   My gosh…  thank goodness for an excellently insulated house, because without any form of heat, the lowest it would go was 48 degrees.   If we ran a couple kerosene heaters and two small electric heaters, we could get it around 54 degrees.  They didn’t mind, me?  I thought I was going to die a few nights, shivering and cuddled under a bunch of blankets and two dogs!  (It was definitely a three dog night on several occasions but we only had two and a few cats.  I guess we need another dog!   haha… no….)

Once we got the house warmed up, the temperatures are more like 60-65 degrees with the wood furnace running full strength.  Not too bad!  To us, after two super challenging winters, 65 degrees is like shorts and tshirt weather!  And boy, does it feel good coming inside from chores!  Downright sinful!

We started burning our free wood but found that it was going pretty quickly, as it was mostly soft woods, some pine and such.   We knew that pine was not the best to burn, because it creates creosote buildup and well, it burns to fast, it’s just not very effective.  But it was free and that was a good thing, so we burned most of it up in a couple days.  It is nice to be able to have a resource for all the sticks, limbs and dead trees that we have on the estate.  Why not use it up?  It’s good exercise out there gathering sticks and such, as well as free heat!

There is quite a little learning curve to keeping the beast running smoothly.  At first Maggie was pretty much in charge, but we have all learned that you have to keep an eye on the wood level and be prepared to throw in a stick or two when it requires it.  The fan is a little loud but to be honest, you get used to it.   Now hearing the fan is comforting because I know there is a good strong fire in the belly of the beast.   When the fire burns down, the fan shuts off.  There will still be coals and sometimes even a small fire, so it’s easy enough to just add wood and it will start back up.  It’s kind of like the alarm to ADD MORE FUEL!

Most people install these things in their  basement, or even outside in a little building.  Our basement is just nasty and to be honest, if I had to go down there several times a day and night, it just would not happen.  With a 115 year old farmhouse, and a yucky Michigan basement…  that would just not be good.  Having it tucked back in the office is just perfect.   It’s where we spend a good deal of our day, so we are all very nice and toasty warm.  The residual heat rises and spreads out to the bedrooms so by evening, they are nice and comfy.  Just stoke the fire and add a few logs, close your door and go to sleep.

By morning, the fire is usually coals and occasionally out.  No matter.  The house is still a bit warm, perhaps better called a bit chilly.  It’s a perfect time to scoop out the ashes in our metal ash bucket, and then get the furnace ready for the next day’s heating.

If you want something easy and pretty automatic, a wood furnace is NOT for you.  You have to baby the thing, keep fussing over it, tend it through the day and night.  It’s messy.   We have wood bits all over and have to sweep it all up daily.  You have to buy wood or cut wood and stack it and drag it around and all that.  Yeah, it’s not as easy as propane at all.

But it’s a good warm heat.  Smells good too.  And there is something very contented to keeping a fire going.  It’s the thing that old traditions and such are made of.  With the three of us, it’s not that hard of a chore.  And I love the fact that we can use up a lot of our own wood, free to us, here on the property.  That will be nice.  We always seem to have a lot of downed branches and such.  And we have a couple trees that need to come down this spring…  they will make excellent fodder for next winter’s heat!

However, it became apparent that we needed to get a load of hardwood as our pile was quickly going away!  It lasted almost a week…  but it was getting hard to keep up.  20-25 big pieces of wood a day!

So I snooped around and asked questions of fellow woodburners until I found these two delightful young men.  They brought us out a very full pickup truck load of nice hardwood ash to burn!  And they delivered it and unloaded it for us.  I’m pretty sure they would have stacked it for a slight fee as well, but that’s okay, we like free form and I knew that it would be disappearing pretty quickly.

Boy, what a difference!   Now we’re going through about 8 to 10 good sized pieces.   And the hardwood burns a lot hotter and longer.  It’s much better.   And I love that we’re supporting these young men that spent the spring and summer hauling, cutting and splitting all this wood.  They are in highschool and this is their afterschool job!  Pretty cool.

So, that is the story of our now, third year of heating.   I hope that we have finally found the answer.  We have the propane furnace in the basement if we choose to use it, and we have the wood heat upstairs that we are using.   And we have our good old kerosene heaters on standby.   Our goal is to get through the winter and not owe a single dime to anymore for our past heat.  The nice thing about heating with wood, propane and kerosene is that you almost always have to pre-pay for that heat.   We were burdeoned with a electric bill of over $3,000 by this year’s end and we FINALLY paid it all off last month.  Just in time for the new heating season.  That was very hard on us to pay off through the summer when our income is much lower.  I am looking forward to next year being debt free in the heating/electric section of our budget!    Yahooooooooo!!!!!

Gotta go check the beast!

After our storm of Sunday night passed through… (next post!)  We were talking to a friend and she thought we had neighbors like within feet of us…  she was confused by the poultry barn in a rainy video and so I thought, oh, I’ll just go and grab a link to Google Maps to show her the layout of the homestead in relationship to other neighbors.  

Boy, did I get a happy surprise!   Our Google Map has been updated!  No longer was it from years ago with the old owners.. it was OUR Windhaven!   Complete with our modifications and even my garden raised beds and such!  How neat it that!  

The picture above shows our little 3 acres of heaven.  As you can see, we are pretty much surrounded by farmer fields…  and that diagonal road is actually a train track.  The little cluster of buildings to the right, middle is actually an abandoned migrant farm worker camp.  My big ag neighbor owns it and just uses the building now for storage.  So there is no one living there.  I guess my closest neighbor is the old gentleman across the street and to the left.  The house to the middle left is the home of the farmer who owns everything pretty much around us.  

It’s when you see the closer shot that it gets pretty exciting!   From the road you can see Blue parked in the driveway!  You can see the fallen tree up front to the far right, so judging from the thick tree cover and a few other key things, we think this was taken in the early spring.  In the back pasture, you can see the beginnings of our goat playground, but it was only one wire spool and two board ramps.  Not the whole complex setup we have for them now!  You can still see the white truck cap in the old foundation next to the big barn.  Jeremy helped Jessy and I move that shortly after Maggie broke her leg.

I can also see the plastic that we laid down in the garden to help kill off some of the weed growth and where we planted pumpkins and squash.  It looks like there are few small plants growing so I am guessing it was like late June that this was taken.  You can even make out our asparagus patch right behind the big barn in the back!  It looks like a row of green blobs next to that little odd retangular patch which was once a garden and we tried to till up and use but it overgrew like nuts before we could get it planted right.

It’s quite amazing all the detail that can picked out by those satellites in space!  A little scary as well, but hey, who wants to spy on us anyway?  Learn how to maintain a little homestead?  How to make raised beds outta all sorts of weird things?  Go ahead!

The only bummer was that the street view was still the old views from awhile back.  I rather doubt that will change soon.  Still, it’s neat to see that we’ve made our mark on this old planet Earth, eh?

However, once I saw that print out and was looking at it, I just could not help but to start visualizing the various expansions that we want to do eventually with our pastures/fencing and such.  If you really think about it, that upper right quadrant is what we call our weed path and wood lot and it is totally underutilized.    You can sort of see how we fenced in the weed patch and have started to use it for grazing.  Still, there is a lot there.  And the wood lot, well, it’s just not like we would really like it to be.  It’s way too overgrown.  You can’t hardly even walk back there.  Our goal is to get that back part fenced as soon as possible…  the purple line in the back.  It’s about 400 linear feet of fence.  And then just let everyone in there to graze it back and down for us.   It will probably take them a whole season, but that’s fine.  We’re in no rush.  And just slash and cutting it all, well, that’s a lot of good goat grazing gone to waste!

We have a friend, John, who has some great big mechanical toys that we might be doing a little trade and barter with to help us dig out a little fence line back there.  It’s a little hard to see, but the plan is to leave some vegetation at the fence line, a sort of living hedge and green privacy fence.   We will come in about 8 to 10 feet, and cut a fence path about 4 or 5 feet wide.  In that path we will pretty much cut down any small trees and brush to make a clear zone for the fence to be installed.  And so that we can see the fence once it’s up and keep the area clean…  it’s so helpful to be able to walk the fence every so often to make sure there are no breaks or trees down on it, etc.  The hedge behind the fence will work as a sort of animal barrier as well, a second line of protection.  There is a wee bit of old fence entangled in the hedge already and areas are very thick, but some are open.  We will probably continue to weave in some old chicken wire, low, so that the weeds and bramble grow over it.  It seems to have worked in other areas of the hedge and it would be a great way to encourage that living fence there!  It’s so pretty in the spring and summer, all the wildflowers and such back there, birds, butterflies and little critters.  We like that a lot.  They just don’t need one whole quarter of our property for it!

Another plan is to expand the dog yard so that we don’t have to mow that area!  If it was fenced, like the dog yard is, we can let the sheep and goats in there every so often to eat it all down.  Our goal is to only have to mow right around the house and in the driveway courtyard!!!  After all, when you have  grass eating livestock, why not let them take care of it.  I do not like mowing that much!  And it’s good fodder for them.  And gives them something to do!

Eventually, we’d like to also fence in the upper left quadrant with perimeter fence.   Then we could let the flock in that long skinny area now and then, to keep it cleaned back and all, but still preserve the beauty of the privacy hedge.  Not sure if that will happen in 2014, but it’s on the planbook.    The wood lot pasture WILL go down…  it’s our last big project.  I hope to get the fence soon and we are talking with John to possibly even cut the path before it gets too cold and too into the winter months. It will be sure easier to do with everything dormant and dead, like all the grasses and brush.  Way easier!  We’ll have to probably go in there and start with a chainsaw and just cut a preliminary path, make sure we can cut as straight a path as we can.

It’s fun to plot and plan…  and these satellite maps really make it neat to see the whole overall plot of your homestead.  It also helps you to see the areas that are not being used well and how you can improve your little estate, too!