WE HAVE HEAT!!

The one thing I love about life in Wyoming is that every little thing had been an adventure!  Every day is a new challenge and it’s the little things in life that mean so much!

I think the last time I wrote that we now have the tiniest bit of electricity… enough to run the TV (by the way there are NO free channels here! What am I gonna do without my Bachelor!!!) but we don’t get quite enough electricity to run the microwave.  Well, technically it will work, but usually it takes 30 seconds or so to cook a single hot dog and now it takes 3-4 minutes!  I think I’m going to try and see if my crock pot will work this week! Like I said, every week is a new adventure!

The great exciting news about this week…. WE HAVE HEAT!  We went about 2 weeks ago to buy our wood stove from TSC ($549) plus all the piping (~$600) and 600 wood bricks ($300).  Here is the interesting part.  Scott’s truck has been acting up so we don’t trust driving it long distances.  Well, in order to go get the wood stove we took my car and pulled our little white trailer.  Funny thing… we underestimated the weight of the wood stove (~250 lbs) and the 600 wood bricks!  We first started loading all the wood bricks at the front of the trailer and ended up the weight on it put too much pressure on the hitch of my car and the shocks on the back tires!!  So we had to rearrange everything and put most of the weight on the back of the trailer.  We were laughing the entire way home!

It took about a week or so to get the mudroom cleaned out, the trailers organized and brought down by the house, all the wood bricks brought into the house and stacked up in the mudroom, plus getting the woodstove in the house.  We decided we didn’t want the stove to sit directly on the floor and we don’t have the money right now to add carpet or another floor covering, so we had to be creative!  We decided to use a free wood pallet and cover it with scraps of plywood.   Then we went to the Habitat for Humanity ReStore in Powell and got about 30 12x12 tile squares, a bucket of stuff to make the tiles stick to the pallet (forgive me I forget what the stuff is called!), and I even found this rustic metal bucket that is perfect for putting kindling in – all for just $17!!  Scott said the tiles alone would have cost close to $100 or more, so I think we did pretty good!  I’ll take a picture this week of the tile on the pallet to show you the fun design Scott came up with.

I think the hardest part of putting in the stove was 2 fold  - first the stove was REALLY heavy!  We had to take our sweet time getting it into the house and then lifting it up on the pallet too.  Second, getting the piping to fit correctly in the hole we had to make in the house was stressful.  You wouldn’t think it would be, I mean, first make a hole, second put the pipe in the hole, third add the trim pieces…. But here’s the problem.  We didn’t even think about the fact that our walls are much thicker than the common wall because of all the foam insulation!  So Scott had to make another trip to get another pipe that was long enough to go through our wall. But we finally got it installed! I say ‘we’, but I must admit that I mostly pulled ‘cat guard’ the entire time so we didn’t have any crazy cats try to escape through the hole!!

We’ve now had the wood stove up and running for 3 nights!  It’s been wonderful!  It’s technically not cold enough out for us to use it yet, however it’s so nice and cozy, not to mention soothing and relaxing to end the day with a nice fire.  We’ve also used these last few days as a ‘test’ to see how well our insulation would do.  Keep in mind it had been in the 70s during the day and down in the 40s at night… so not too terribly cold out.  The first night we put a little kindling on to get it started plus one wood brick, that’s all!  The temperature in the house went from 63 to 72 in a matter of about 30 minutes.  It stayed at 72 up till we went to bed.  I forgot to close the windows that night (we had two of them cracked open) and in the morning it was still 68 in the house! Last night, the temperature also went up to 72 and by morning it was still 70 degrees.  We kept the house shut up all day and didn’t have a fire going till late this evening.  Even then it was still 68 in the house!  I’m really impressed with our insulation!  It seems that we only need to burn one wood brick at night and it’s been keeping the house at a very comfortable temperature throughout the night and the next day.  One wood brick cost us fifty cents! That’s it! And the kindling has all been scraps so basically free.  I’ll keep you all posted how many wood bricks we need throughout the winter, but I am going to make a hypothesis that it will be cheaper overall compared to paying for a propane or gas powered furnace.

On another note, we discovered that no matter how hard we try, we can’t get any free TV channels here! I realize I already mentioned this above, but it’s been driving Scott nuts so I guess it’s worth mentioning twice!  Well, we’ve watched all 7 seasons of Gilmore Girls like 5 times just this year, so we are now going through all Scott’s movies.  I’m sorry, but I can only handle so much of John Wayne!  Yes, I’m a cowgirl at heart, but those movies tend to put me to sleep.  Today we went to Cody and checked out 8 DVDs and 4 VHS tapes. It’s exciting to watch different stuff now!!

And today I bought some new things at the grocery store in an attempt to try cooking on our woodstove tonight.  So tonight for dinner I cut up some red potatoes, tossed them in vegetable oil mixed with a chopped up piece of garlic and some Italian seasoning.  Then I used my horse Ceasar’s old horse shoe as a trivet and cooked the potatoes in a skillet covered in foil.  It took about 1 hour to cook and let me tell you it was worth the wait!! They were so good!!  I can’t wait to cook something else tomorrow night.  I bought stuff to make homemade rice crispy treats as a surprise for Scott!

I really don’t have a lot more to say… I’ve been sewing and working on some new things for sale and also hemmed curtains and made some curtains for one of our neighbors.  Now I’m getting ready to make a few more things and some curtains for another neighbor!  Scott helped on a project for our neighbor Gordy and he’s starting to apply for jobs, fingers crossed!

And for anyone wondering, we still don’t have running water or full electricity (just one power strip is all), and our OH house is still for sale.  But we have a great realtor working her hardest to sell it and we’re so thankful for her! Just waiting for that special person to see just how wonderful it is!

Again, I apologize for not having pictures this time…. I’m using the ‘hotspot’ on my phone for the internet and the pictures are just taking forever to load, so I’ll wait till I’m in town to do laundry next and you all will get a bunch then!!

Have a great weekend!!