Winter is coming

Winter is coming - as Game of Throners might say - and Chook Towers is preparing for the coming season.

First up, wood, lots of it, dry and light and ready for burning. OK I have to pay someone else to do the cutting and drying, as I don't have any woodland (now is that an investment opportunity to look into, I wonder...) nor the space to leave wood to season naturally for a few years, but the site of our two packed log-stores is - figuratively speaking - heart-warming.

Incidentally, the log shed furthest from the camera was bought,

 the nearer, better-looking one built from odds and ends and a 

few lengths from a local timber yard. Smug rating, ooh, about a 7 I think...

I love an open wood fire, but they are not very efficient, and a bit dangerous, so we have a log burning stove fitted in the front room. I know summer and winter are currently deadlocked at the moment - we're getting really warm days followed by much cooler days, then warmer ones again but we've already had a couple of fires, using up the last of last winter's wood and various scrag ends of timber I've scrounged up during the summer tidy-up. The stove is great, as it can whack out a fair amount of heat, yet is very controllable, and can be shut down overnight, then if I've stoked it right, flamed-up again in the morning. It's even therapeutic just watching the flames, especially with a glass of something warm and whiskey-ish to hand. Beats watching TV anyday.

Lovely, but pointing a flash at a glass-fronted stove doesn't do it justice. 

(Must clean that stain off the hearth as well someday....)

Its also a great weapon against identity-theft. Don't mess around shredding and tearing up credit receipts and old bank statements - just chuck 'em in the fire and watch them burn. The ash even goes in the compost bin, then eventually on the garden, so they never leave site. Perfect!

Also using the wood burner, and the pre-paid fixed-price wood from the piles, means burning less unpaid, variably-priced gas from the mains. Unfortunately, I'll never not burn gas, we cook and heat water with it, and because we have too much house, inevitably the central heating will come on at some point in the next month or so.

 I know the papers say you should compare the best deals and switch as soon as you find one, but in the grand scheme of things I wonder does that really make much difference? I mean, ultimately the UK doesn't make much of its own gas, oil and coal these days, so most of it has to be bought in wholesale. Presumably all the companies have to buy in their supplies from the same place anyway so the 'deals' can't really be that good long-term. 

Of course there's no point heating a house full of holes, so another job is to fix up draught-proofing around the doors, and get the windows sorted. They don't close properly - never really have done since they were installed, a bit of a botch job by the double-glazing company before they went bust (we do pick them!). I'll get on to instructables or somesuch and find out how to adjust them, I already figured out how to fix the back door as the hinges keep dropping and the door needs to be raised back up again regularly (why is a simple thing like a door now so complicated? And why can't a company do what they say they are going to do on the blimming order form!!?!?!)

We are determined not to put the heating on until we absolutely have to, we'd rather take advantage of the novel idea of putting an extra layer of clothes on. Or moving around a bit. Or going outside, which bizarrely at the moment sometimes  seems warmer than indoors!

Mind you when I do go outside when the fire's lit, there's a strong slightly acrid smell of burning coming from somewhere close by - maybe I should have got the chimney swept as well....