Dear Reader,

let this be a lesson to you and serve as a warning. The desires of this man are simple, give me food and give me heat. Put those things together and give me hot food and as Dawn (now my wife) found out you’ll have me forever.

Living where we do in France we tend to get power cuts so we always plan to have 2 ways to do most things. This means for heat we’ll have a wood burning boiler to top up the electric one, to cook food we’ll have a gas hob as well as an electric oven. You get the point, however this romance comes with a price and up until now i’d not given it a lot of thought.

Throughout the year you would have read that we’ve been stripping wood and burning it in the stove that came with the house. This served a purpose as the wood clad walls needed to go and as we had no heat burning this was a perfect way do use this. Alas we found the stove to be too small to generate any good amount of heat and we found ourselves burning as much of the wood as we had for very little heat output, then along came Godin! The Godin is a somewhat antique wood burning stove our friend lent us after taking pity on us knowing how much wood we were burning through for so little heat. The Godin is a mean beast, it burns whatever we throw in it for a huge amount of heat and thankfully churned through the wood that we’d collected.

Now you see i’m a romantic, the idea of big logs on the stove, keeping the house, my wife and me warm was enticing… A quick phone call and a week later 4 “stairs” of wood were delivered. Now living in London i don’t burn wood (i should) and i certainly have never ordered wood so 4 “stairs” was a guestimate but how hard could it be right? Get it delivered, stack it and burn it for a happy ending…. Kind of ;)

Have you any idea how much 4 stairs of wood is? Neither did I, have you any idea how small it looks in a pile? I did and that’s not very big I thought, i’ll stack that in an hour later… 4 hours! 4 bloody hours later of  lumping, moving, stacking, dropping, swearing and aching and it’s in a pile, only for the dog to steal a log and have some of the end collapse!

Let this be a warning to you my friends, wood burning may be a necessity but unless you have teenage kids who’ll do anything for money or some hired help please only order 1 stair, my back is killing me…

Now i need a hot bath but D’oh we only shower, at least i’ll be able to run the heat FULL POWER for the rest of the time we are here knowing that in theory i’m carbon neutral ;)

This really isn’t a moan as I love the stove and the loading of it, but this is a plea to my wife to HELP ME NEXT TIME… By the way Dawn “where did you go?“.

Yours achingly

Lee

PS : I know it’s cliche but as a man I just HAD to get a big axe, just ask any man it’s an essential tool in any armoury :)

I got the wood. Might as well have a chopper.

I know! It doesn’t look that much.

Still more to go.

2nd time the front load was stacked.