For about eight months I and my significant other lived in a cabin in the woods up in the Pacific Northwest, and the sole source of heat for that cabin was a wood burning stove.
Our stove was a custom made one, sort of like a freestanding fire box. It stood about three feet off the cabin's floor on a stone platform, was long and rectangular, and could take pieces of wood a little over two feet long.
Douglas fir was the best fireplace wood, and I got that from some guy in town that was known to have the best, seasoned so it would burn just right. But, mixed in with the load of wood I got were two other types of wood that were of lesser burn quality, but that's how all the local firewood sellers sold their stock. You couldn't buy just premium.
Both of us loved that cabin and that little wood burning stove. One load of wood was usually enough to get us through the night, any night, because the outside temperature didn't vary a whole lot, and always at night was the time we did 'the burn' because we usually left during the day and didn't want the stove active while we were gone, although that happened occasionally. By then there were only coals left, embers.
The wood we got was sawed in two foot lengths, but I had to split it, and to do that I got a triangular-headed splitting maul, sort of an unwieldy ax with a sturdy fiberglass handle, and got pretty good at splitting wood though I had to be careful when doing so because missing meant that the ax would careen off at an angle. Aiming for the center of the log and hitting the wood with enough force to cleave it in two in one shot took practice and focus.
'Doug' fir split the easiest, the other two woods not as easy. One of the other woods was a lesser quality pine, which split almost as cleanly as Doug fir but didn't last as long in the stove. The other wood, I think it was called 'Alder', was a commonly found Pacific Northwest wood of the deciduous variety (leafy), with low burn quality and could, if you hit it off center, splinter and twist the ax somewhat as the wood shaving got cast off to the side. I learned to be super careful when splitting Alder.
Anyway, when that was done, it was time to take the night's wood into the cabin and set it near the stove. I transported the load into the cabin using a lightweight U-shaped metal sling. Atop that load was always a micro-split piece of Doug fir, little sticks that I would use, along with a piece or two of crumpled-up newspaper, to start the fire. Doug fir logs burned the longest and most evenly, those I put into the stove long after I started the fire with the other two woods and let it burn down some, to where there were glowing coals.
Ours had a refrigerator on the porch
Joel Jasmin- Unsplash.com
Was it work? Yeah, it was work. Was it dirty? Yeah, there was soot, dust, pieces of bark, and ashes to contend with. Was it worth it? Yes- every time! The sight of the fire, the heat that the stove produced, the sounds that the fire made (we had our TV right off to the side of the stove) as the fire burned, and then going to sleep with the fireplace burning down to embers (our 'bedroom' was part of our living room) was magical. We always dried our damp clothes off to the side of the fire box, had them hanging there on racks we had found, because in the Pacific Northwest it rains a lot.
Over the course of the season I split the contents of an entire storage shed full of firewood (just over a cord) and was set to get another load of wood but life happened and we moved into a different situation, one that didn't have a wood burning stove as our source of heat.
I miss that old stove, have missed it ever since we left. But, I found a substitute for the real thing. Netflix has fireplace videos- 'Fireplace For Your Home'- and I play them all the time, the ones without music. Virtual fireplaces. I got one playing right now, as I'm writing this. No, it doesn't have the same ambience as our cabin's stove had but I'll take it. It's relaxing to have it on the TV.
There are other videos out there that are said to be 'relaxing' but I find them too busy. There's one called 'Moving Art' that is strikingly beautiful, I think that is what is playing on all those super high def TV's that greet you when you walk into Costco. The problem with ambient videos like these is, I can't take my eyes off of them! I'm mesmerized by the moving schools of fish, the water cascading down the waterfalls, the slow motion helicopter/drone flyover shots....
....the jellyfish 'swimming' in the sea somewhere..... ...the pride of lions lying languid, lit by the setting sun.... ....I have to find the willpower to break away, reach for the remote, and turn the TV off.
At the cabin, I could take my eyes off the firebox and just listen to the sounds the fire was making, or I could open the door to the firebox and watch the fire burn. I could feel the heat that the fire put out, come closer to the fire if I needed a warmup, or step back some if the fire was putting out too much heat. Also, there was always the smell, faint, of wood smoke in the house, which is a good, sweet smell. Our firebox heating system was all natural, the way it should be. It was primal. Ancestral. Coyotes howled in the fields outside our cabin almost every night, and when that was coupled with a full moon peeking out from storm toss'd Pacific Northwest clouds, well, it just couldn't get any better.