Category: woodburner

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‘Tis the season

It’s the season of evening fires, big skies, woolly socks, sleeping cats and warming food.

Winter is upon us, and although it’s not that cold yet, the trees are bare and the nights are stretching, dark and long.

It is dark now by 4.30pm and we make sure that the log basket is filled before then and that the woodburner is lit.

It’s a ritual that I love, turning the lights on, lighting candles in the living area and generally making things cosy. The crackling of the logs and the faint scent of woodsmoke are an essential part of winter.

The cats are usually in and sleeping if the weather is wet or windy, and it’s often both.

We bought a couple of extra chairs this week so that we can accommodate eight around the dining table more comfortably at Christmas. We have family staying plus friends and it’ll save us having to wheel office chairs in.

My love affair with old Ercol pieces continues. These are cowhorn chairs, as they’re called, solidly made of English elm, dating back to the 1950s. Elm is a lovely wood. Ercol are still making these today, but they’re no longer made of elm as there’s none left after Dutch Elm Disease ravaged the English forests over the last fifty years.

They join the mismatched crew of chairs from our previous lives around my old French oak dining table, made from trees felled in a French forest after the big storms of 1995.

I like that our furniture has had lives. It may be a bit shabby but it suits us.

We also unpacked my old sewing machine at last, so I’ve had a bit of a rearrange in my study to set it up and make a little space for sewing and another for reading and watching the world go by.

I can’t wait to get my easels in there and a work table so that I can also paint.

And get some art up onto the walls. It’s still all in the shed with the remaining boxes awaiting the walls to be finished. The house looks empty without art.

Soon, soon.

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Snow and seedlings

We’ve had a second bout of very cold weather over the last week, with a good few inches of snowfall, and blizzard conditions.

Friends living in a caravan a few miles away whilst they self-build their house have found their water tank and pipes frozen over these last few days.

Between the snow flurries

It takes me right back to our caravan days in the last really cold snap a few years ago with husband heading out into the snow in his dressing gown and wellies, clutching my hairdryer to try and thaw out our frozen water pipes. Unsuccessfully.

It makes me doubly grateful that we are warm and dry in the house in comfort now. In the evenings we fire up the woodburner and enjoy the sound of it crackling away cosily in the corner.

Some of my seeds have started to germinate. The cucumbers raced up, and we have a few chillies, lettuce, tomatoes and beans starting to show.

I think that they’re all a bit perplexed at the moment though. Bright sunshine through those big windows, lots of solar gain and warmth, but snow flurries just a few feet away!

Confused cucumber seedlings

Winter still has us in its grip. Cottage pies, warming breakfasts and slower days.

Cottage pies

It has to be done. We don’t take any of this for granted.

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Settling into January

The winter gales are well underway now here on Skye, howling around the house and singing in the woodburner flue. The good thing is that the house feels solid and warm, despite being perched on the cusp of this very exposed hill overlooking the sea.

A break in the storms

I still haven’t got used to the lack of rocking motion that we used to have in the caravan whenever the wind blew! I’m sure I developed sea legs in the two years that we lived in it.

Woodburner doing its thing

We’ve decided not to unpack any further boxes until we’ve finished the electrics in the house and got some storage built. At the moment we have no lights or live power in about half the house and no bookcases, wardrobes or shelves. Just the essentials. As most of what we will bring in from the boxes will have nowhere to be put away it makes sense to hold off for a while.

Husband is continuing with the fitting of lights and sockets. Once he’s finished that, a good few more weeks work, I’d say, we can start building the shelving for the linen cupboard, server room and pantry. Then we can start unpacking a bit more.

We have just ordered the wood for the bookcases and wardrobes and have a joiner lined up to build them for us in February. That will be a big step forward in making the house a home. At the moment it’s still feeling a bit echoey and empty.

Sunrise this morning

But we’re loving waking up to the most incredible sunrises. The bedroom faces South East and often on even the most grey and dreich of Scottish winter days there’s a brief, glorious burst of early morning sunlight before the clouds swarm across the sky.

Borrowed friends croft dog living it up on the sofa in the sun

The sunlight in the house during the day is fabulous. The low winter sun fills the rooms. Once we have finished I think that this will be a wonderful space to live in. I can already see that we will need to agree on blinds soon..

My job this coming week is to osmo oil the oak interior doors. There are fourteen of them to do, and each door needs two coats, so that will keep me busy for a while. It’s good to be useful beyond feeding us both.

Kitchen in use, with cooks G&T to hand

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Woodburner in the house!

I’ve always had a woodburner in my previous homes. I’m drawn to flames and the smell of woodsmoke. Some would say I’m just a socially well adjusted pyromaniac… maybe not even that well adjusted.

There’s nothing more relaxing on a cold winters day than curling up on a comfy sofa with the woodburner softly glowing and crackling away in a corner.

A SIP house with as much extra insulation as ours and underfloor heating to boot isn’t really in need of an additional heat source.

However, electrical outages and power cuts are common here in the islands during the colder months. Suppliers can take days, and sometimes weeks, to restore power to these remote areas.

The logical part of me reasoned that a secondary power source not dependant on the grid would be sensible for such times, providing warmth and the ability to heat basic food on the top, or potatoes in the body of the stove.

The wildly romantic and emotional side of me admitted that this wasn’t the main reason to have one at all.

The woodburner arrived with the installers yesterday afternoon. It’s an Opus 5kW stove, DEFRA approved and Eco design ready, meaning it matches the European regulations being brought in to clamp down on emissions of wood burning stoves that’ll come in later this year.

A day of hard work by Mathew and Kev and she sits resplendent in her corner ready for action. We need to repair the plasterboard on the ceiling where the flue has been cut through, but it’s nearly there.. We have a wee chimney too, firmly braced and tied into the roof against the prevailing winds. We will have fires this winter.

We’re receiving threats of visits with marshmallows on sticks…😊

One more step towards this house becoming a home! 😊