Yes, it's finally starting to feel like fall around Baba Yaga's house. The acorns have been falling like mad (one even ticked off my car alarm the other morning!) and the leaves are getting some color. It's cooler too...cold enough in the morning last weekend that I found out I had a problem with my furnace! Better to find out now, when there was bound to be a rebound of warmer temps, then in the dead of winter.
The furnace issue is resolved for now...until I have the funds to replace the oil unit with one that uses natural gas. However, I also decided to put in a wood burning stove. Let me back track...over this weekend, when it got down to 39F and my furnace wouldn't work? Well, I decided to test out the fireplace. There were smoke issues the first go I had with it a number of weeks ago and therefore called in my chimney people. A smoke guard was put in and the wood grate raised, and I really hoped that would address the issue. No such luck. While the smoke wasn't AS bad, it was definitely floating around inside and that's really not good to breathe. The option that the technician had offered in case the smoke guard didn't work was a wood stove insert.
I ended up opting for this sweet little free standing stove, instead of an insert. The inserts are more than twice the price and require electrical to run the blowers (so the heat that's still inside the firebox of the fireplace isn't wasted, but if there's a power outage, you do end up losing the heat). With a free standing unit, all the heat is avaible to radiate into the room. This one is supposed to produce enough warmth for a 1200 square foot house. While the room it'll be in is in the basement and significantly smaller than that, the heat should rise up to the other levels. I'm certainly going to find out! Since it's the time of year when everyone is getting ready for winter, my install won't actually occur until the beginning of November. Being that the weather has gotten warmer and beautiful, I do still have some time.
The second project I'm excited about, is to create a spiral herb garden. If you google that, you'll find all sorts of fun examples. Apparently this method has sprung from the permaculture movement. Right now I've mapped out the area for the placement of the spiral. The cardboard will deter any growth underneath...grass and otherwise. Today I was out and about sourcing material for the walls. I would love to use stone, but it seems cost prohibitive so tomorrow I'm going to check out used brick. As a material, brick would be a consistent appearance with the house, so it really would be fine. After that, it'll be a matter of building the walls with the bricks and deciding on what planting medium to put in...some folks use good garden soil, but it seems the original idea is to use straw, packing it in between the walls and dampening it with water, then making little holes just big enough for a couple handfuls of soil to put the plants in. Over time the straw will break down.
Lastly, though it's not really a project, I think I'm done decorating for fall/Halloween! Well, there are enough pumpkins now anyway. Closer to the holiday, I'll probably put my skeley friend just to the left of the door, sitting on one of my folding chairs...maybe holding a jack-o-lantern?? We'll see. Oh, there *is* another string of orange lights for the porch too!
Art is still sort of on the back burner, even though I continue to expose/process/scan film. That being said, there is a glimmer of desire to create (specifically artwork, that is) rising to the surface. More to come on that front.
I think the spiral herb garden sounds like such a cool idea. I hope you'll continue to post about it so I can follow the progress. Take care.
Posted by: Miach Rhys | 10/10/2014 at 12:27 PM