I bought a wood stove from a friend earlier this year while on a visit to his house. It was still cold out and he was stoking the fire in his basement when I first saw it.

It is a nice Fisher, so when he priced it at under $100, I bought it on the spot. I figure a nice stove like this one will probably last me for the rest of my life. Stoves are like anvils, they’re hard to tear up.

As a condition of the sale, he was to use it until warm weather and then I was to help move it and help him put the other one in place.

I like to have a wood stove in the house for backup heat — you know, the kind of heat everyone seems to like to back up to. I grew up with wood and coal heat, and I know how good it feels. Not only that, there is something about tending to a fire that I really enjoy. Wood heat is also economical for the most part, with the majority of the cost coming in the form of labor. Labor is easier to furnish than money for the oil bill at my house, so I figure it might come in handy in more ways than one.

But here it is September already and I don’t have so much as a stick of firewood cut. I do have a chain saw and a pickup truck, so I suppose I shouldn’t be complaining. In the past, a few local folks have allowed me to cut wood, so I am hoping that I can find someone to let me do it again this year. I have been advised that it will likely take up to seven truck loads of wood to get me through the winter. I see that as a worst-case scenario. The last time I burned wood with a monitor heater for a backup, I think I used three or four loads.

Given that information, I figure I will need to cut at least four loads to feel pretty good about my chances, not to mention gathering up at least a load of kindling from some source or the other. I used to have an acquaintance who ran a furniture shop that gave me little scraps for kindling, but he has since stopped doing that. I suppose I will have to try and find another source.

I wasn’t planning on getting the stove moved so late in the year, but the fellow I bought the stove from has been hard to get in touch with since early spring due to his work schedule and the fact that he and his family spend a lot of time traveling when they aren’t working. I had planned on getting it back in June or July, but we never could get our schedules synchronized. If I had realized just how heavy it is, I might have put it off even more.

As I said, it is a full-sized stove and it came complete with fire bricks surrounded by several hundred pounds of cast iron. I would estimate its weight at 500 pounds. I took along another friend and went to pick it up after calling the fellow who had it and finding him at home. I called socially, but mentioned the stove. He first said he would rather do it another time, then said, “Come on and get it.” I had just finished helping move a whole bunch of hay at the fairgrounds and didn’t really feel like doing it, but I figured I better do it while the doing was good. After I arrived at his house, he removed the stove pipe and then jacked the stove up on a floor jack. We then rolled it, on the jack, across the basement floor. Everything was going just fine until we got to the door.

That’s where we had actually lift the stove up and over the threshold. After picking it up once, even with the other two men helping, I could tell that I didn’t really care if I ever did it again. However, I knew subconsciously that I would likely be doing it several more times before it was over with.

The stove was simultaneously heavy and awkward; since two of us were holding the heavier end, it made it very difficult to fit through the door. We put it down outside the door and then managed to heft it once more and lay it down on its side in the back of the truck.

There it lay for a few days while I was searching for help to try and get it moved into the house. I have found that, after getting someone to help move the stove once, it is difficult or impossible to get them to come back.

Then a sick friend called and asked for help mowing, so I had to figure out what to do. I backed up to a small bank under the apple tree in my yard and muscled the stove off the back of the truck and it landed upright after falling about six inches. It immediately started sinking.

After waiting several days and worrying that the stove might sink even more or vanish altogether into the tree’s root system, I finally had a friend come over and offer to help me get it moved. We tried several methods before tying it to the truck bumper and tipping it over onto a cart and pulling the cart up to the front of the house with a chain. We then tipped it back upright on the cement pad in front of the house, where it remains as I write this, the rain making the surface rust brighten. I am going to treat the surface this evening with stove black and light a fire to clean off the rust.

Then all I have to do is get it indoors and figure out how to run my flue through the ceiling. Between that and getting the wood cut, I should have plenty to do for the next year or so. Since I have no more than three months to finish, that’s a tall order. Of course, if I worried about that, I’d be too occupied to get any work done.

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