HA! I love this thread. My husband is SUCH a city boy! Lord only knows how I ended up married to one... I grew up splitting logs and riding horses and shooting shotguns in Texas, and he grew up a doctor's kid in a 3,500 sq ft house with more bathrooms than people in the biggest city in Utah. Whiz with a computer though. He can take apart a laptop, fix it, and put it back together in forty five minutes. I once tried to replace the keyboard in mine and ended up dropping one of the fifty thousand itty bitty stupidly small screws... Anyway.
I revoked his guy card shortly after we got married, on Thanksgiving. We driving to see his folks, and I told him his car probably needed some oil because I could smell some burning, and when was the last time he checked it? He sort of hemmed and hawed and said he was sure it was fine because the "light wasn't on yet". We got to their house and I told him to check the oil real quick while I ran inside with the food. He hadn't come back in for ten minutes, so I went outside wondering what the hell he was doing. And he couldn't find the dipstick. For God's sake, IT'S ORANGE.
And then there was the lovely moment when I had a flat tire, I called him to tell him I'd be late. He picks that moment to tell me he took the tire iron OUT OF MY CAR and didn't put it back. Why? I have no idea. Why didn't HIS car have a tire iron? Because he's an idiot. Needless to say, I made him pick me up and went home in HIS car while he changed the tire.
Anyway, the wood stove was my idea. Our furnace is 30 years old and died last year- honestly it needed to be taken out and shot years ago, and because we live in a mobile home, you have to get a special kind of furnace and a special kind of adapter and a special kind of gas exchange... $$$$$. Plus some other stuff I'm pretty sure the guy made up. (It's like this with EVERYTHING for a mobile home... washer and dryer hookups, gas range hookups, water heater... I nearly broke down and cried when it turned out you had to have a SPECIAL WOOD STOVE too!) I'm a crunchy granola sort of person (I get paid to be a professional hippie to new mamas and babies, very fun job) so of course the idea of heating my house naturally appealed to me. And we could get a wood stove bought and installed for less than it would cost to replace our furnace and update the ducting, plus it's MOUNDS cheaper to run- we spend about $120 a month on heating during the winter with our gas furnace, and I was like... "$1000 wood stove... $3000 furnace... I live next to a forest..." The math was pretty simple! He was NOT happy about it and told me I had to find a wood stove AND install it for less than $3,000. Little did he know I'd find this place! Mwahahaha.
I plan on doing most of the work with the wood pile. He'll just have to do the real heavy lifting- I'm 110 pounds soaking wet, plus I have the little one underfoot most of the time. He thinks I'm a complete nutter to shun modern technology for something nobody's used in 100 years. For a while he thought I was kidding. Then I reminded him that the last time he thought I was kidding, I made him drive to Colorado for a 100 year old sewing machine. (Don't look at me like that! It was just like the one my grandmother had!)
We need a chick's thread. =D
~Rose
