We Bought A Wood Burner!!

Yippee! We bought a wood burner!! After much consideration this is the one I’ve chosen for the office, the F 100, a gorgeous 5kW cast iron multi-fuel stove by Norwegian company Jøtul, robust and solid like my home, modern in functionality, but decorative and quite pretty too. It’s not been fitted yet as we’ve all the usual prep work to do but the decision has been made & the receipt filed!

There are SO many wood burners to chose from, though our choices were honed slightly as we live in a smoke free city zone which thus requires a DEFRA approved model. Short fat ones, tall Scandi ones, Victoriana, round & contemporary, white & cream, the list is endless, however Moregeous Mansions is an ornate Edwardian house of hefty proportions, so the fire had to fit that brief. I wanted a fire of excellent quality, gorgeous design, craft filled heritage and heat pumpin’ marvellousness and I think I got one.

Do you think it’ll work well, especially when sitting on the type of patterned tiles I’m lusting after? I love it almost as much as I loved the Viking paper helmet meant for under sixes 😉

Thank you to my cousin Nick who has a fab stove store called Fuelmizas up in Lancashire for those of you up that way (We’ll be up for stove No2 soon!), and also to the Stove Room in West Didsbury for help and advice x

We bought the fire just before Christmas (instead of wasting money on presents we didn’t really need) but I’m still allowed to be massively excited about it as it only arrives this week. Before we’d even made the final decision on which one, I was planning how toasty and warm it’d be in the downstairs office however as usual things have done a 180 degree about face here…. I’ve moved upstairs! Yesterday my whole office life was in this room below but now it’s just the last battered, sloping floor waiting to be taken up, re-levelled and insulated. In about a month, my new fire will be popped right where that hole is, well, once it’s been lined and tiled that is.Completing the task of taking up and re-laying all the uneven and unsupported joists to the dining and living room was a lot to bite off, even for me & Mr M with all our DIY skills and experience. We are neither trained joiners nor bricklayers but with money short and the days shorter, we’d nothing to lose and everything to gain by completing this job on our own. I guesstimated that if we paid builders to do it, we’d have been £2500 worse off. You know what they call that? Motivation.

These are how they look today, with their own sad looking fireplaces waiting to be filled. We can’t put any flooring back down until the spaces in between each joist are carefully and properly insulated, so for now it’s a balancing act and no going downstairs once gin has been drunk 😉

Today’s job is to calculate all the plasterboard needed for the next few weeks, plus finally complete all the West Wing ceiling insulation so there’s no more dust and mess created, especially as my office has been temporarily re-sited up there. Plus the plasterer is starting on the fireplaces, I’ve a meeting about a sensory garden at the Baths and an article to write for Real Homes magazine. 2016, bring it on 🙂

(BTW More technical blog post on stoves coming up soon x)