The heart of any homestead is, of course, the wood stove. A source of heat, a place to warm food, and the visual center of the living room, the wood stove is the quintessential appliance.
From the laying of the very first hearth brick to the final coat of poly on the oak trim for the embossed steel backboard, it took us a little over four years to complete our wood stove project!
It wasn’t for lack of desire to finish it, but a matter of prioritizing the flow of homesteading work. Once the cement board was installed on the floor and wall, the hearth brick laid and the mortar dry (spearheaded by my buddy Frank Jones, and chronicled in a YouTube), the stove positioned and the flue ran through the ceiling, the stove became serviceable, and the finish trim could wait while we turned our attention to other more important projects.
Our stove is a huge old Woodland, capable of heating the entire house. To help move the warm air, I secured a 12″ Vornado fan up in the rafters, blowing down through the doorway into the old part of the house. Works like a charm.
It was a year later, when we were installing the hardwood floor, that I finished the ceramic tile trim in front of the stove.
At that point it was only the 24″x24″ embossed copper-coated steel panels for the back wall that remained, but that work was postponed until earlier this year, when wintry weather made an nice indoor project the thing to do. Installing the panels did take some doing, getting them plumb and well-secured to the wall using small brass screws and a special heat-resistant adhesive. It also required considerable use of my tin snips to trim the panels the fit the outside edges of the cement board.
When I had finished mounting the metal panels earlier this year, I decided some nice oak trim was needed to tie it all together. A few weeks later, I hung milled 4″ oak trim, stained the wood a nice golden oak color, and applied some polyurethane for a bit of sheen. Finished that up just today.
It’s true what they say about delayed gratification, you know.
