The mess has begun! In our old house, built way back when, we still hold Sunday school for our children and teens. We have been doing this since we moved out of the old house and into the new house back in December of 2012. Without a warm little family living inside, cooking, baking, and keeping the stove stoked, the house is even colder inside. We have said that if the house was warmer, we could hold other meetings in it and it would just plain make Sunday school more pleasant. However, we were not able to afford to put in a new heating system in the old house when it at least had this stove in it,
...and the new house had no heating system at all.
Thankfully, once all was prepped and ready for us to put a coal burning stove into the new house we received a substantial love offering which allowed us to purchase this stove.
I won't go into all the details about the installation of this stove as that is described in several older posts here and here. Needless to say, it is a huge process.
We moved into our new house on Christmas Eve of 2011. We enjoyed our heating system which provided much more heat than we ever "experienced" in our old house. One thing about heating a house in the middle of Siberia is that even after the hours of planning, it is still "trial and error" once everything is up and running. In the time since our installation, we have realized a few changes that we need to make like installing a few more radiators in certain rooms.
As we spent the next few winters using the coal burning stove we learned through experience that it has to be maintained about every 2-3 hours maximum in the colder months. It is just as time consuming as that old stove in the old house pictured up above, with the exception that you had to go outside to stoke the newer one while the older one was in our kitchen! One problem that we didn't foresee with the coal/wood burning stove was the increased exposure to fumes and smoke. My husband tended to the stove most of the time. After a month or two of being exposed to that smoke, he became ill with bronchitis. For two weeks, I took care of the 'stove stoking' and his condition improved. So, we had him go back into our stove room a few times a day and immediately he started coughing again.
My husband had been looking into pellet stoves since we began this heating system journey. We had always dreamed of one day buying a pellet stove for several reasons: it is a much cleaner way to heat, the inconsistency in the quality of coal here varies greatly, and eventually, we could even possibly make our own pellets. As we looked further into pellet stoves, my husband was able to find some difficult parts in another city. The Lord worked it out for them to then be packed in a friend's mom's container to be shipped by train along with an order she had made, decreasing the shipping cost greatly. Things seemed to be coming together for us to one day own a pellet stove, except the stove itself. They were still pretty pricey.
In 2013, and just as we were about to leave to the US on furlough, another missionary who was coming to live in our house and take care of our ministry while we were gone, decided that a pellet stove was sounding pretty tempting to keep from having to run outside every 2-3 hours to stoke the coal stove. So, they were kind enough to purchase the stove with our approval, install it as my husband planned, and use it in our absence. We are still paying that purchase back to the missionary I believe, but we look forward to trying it out ourselves this winter!
Here she is!
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So, having said all that we can return to the stove in the old house. Only now, it looks more like this:
As we spent the next few winters using the coal burning stove we learned through experience that it has to be maintained about every 2-3 hours maximum in the colder months. It is just as time consuming as that old stove in the old house pictured up above, with the exception that you had to go outside to stoke the newer one while the older one was in our kitchen! One problem that we didn't foresee with the coal/wood burning stove was the increased exposure to fumes and smoke. My husband tended to the stove most of the time. After a month or two of being exposed to that smoke, he became ill with bronchitis. For two weeks, I took care of the 'stove stoking' and his condition improved. So, we had him go back into our stove room a few times a day and immediately he started coughing again.
My husband had been looking into pellet stoves since we began this heating system journey. We had always dreamed of one day buying a pellet stove for several reasons: it is a much cleaner way to heat, the inconsistency in the quality of coal here varies greatly, and eventually, we could even possibly make our own pellets. As we looked further into pellet stoves, my husband was able to find some difficult parts in another city. The Lord worked it out for them to then be packed in a friend's mom's container to be shipped by train along with an order she had made, decreasing the shipping cost greatly. Things seemed to be coming together for us to one day own a pellet stove, except the stove itself. They were still pretty pricey.
In 2013, and just as we were about to leave to the US on furlough, another missionary who was coming to live in our house and take care of our ministry while we were gone, decided that a pellet stove was sounding pretty tempting to keep from having to run outside every 2-3 hours to stoke the coal stove. So, they were kind enough to purchase the stove with our approval, install it as my husband planned, and use it in our absence. We are still paying that purchase back to the missionary I believe, but we look forward to trying it out ourselves this winter!
Here she is!
That pipe that you see leading out of the range of the photo connects to a barrel which holds the pellets.
The temperature can be set and an auger feeds the pellets into the stove so there is little to no "maintaining" the stove. It's pretty basic and low maintenance! Perfect! My husband could probably explain it all in greater detail so if you have any questions, just ask them in the comments below and I will have him answer them. :)
The building the stove is housed in was an old "banya" built by the previous owners of the property and small house. We plan on tearing it all down and rebuilding a nicer building which will also serve as a warm room for garden seedlings and be connected to a stable for our goats to winter in. The goal was to do tear down and rebuild this past summer, but we were financially unable to do so in time before summer ended and the time when we need to use the heating system approached.
So, having said all that we can return to the stove in the old house. Only now, it looks more like this:
Then, my hubby was able to do some more work on it a few days ago and now it looks like this:
Now that we have the pellet stove to use for the new house this winter, we can put the coal burning stove into the old house, in the same spot where the original stove was located. I am so excited! Normally, we can not take our gloves and hats off in the winter time during Sunday school. Even with this stove going and a cannon heater right beside us, it is cold. We are planning on purchasing radiators just as we did in our new house to install in each of the four rooms of the old house. If the coal burning stove is positioned in the place of the original one, it will be in the middle of the house thus making it easier to design a circulating pipe system to reach all four rooms. This house being much smaller in size, the job will be completed quickly once we have the necessary supplies.
We had a bathroom in the old house for our family to use, but without the house being heated year round, we removed the tub and closed off the wall temporarily before removing the toilet and bathroom completely (to the right of this pic below). We had a terrible time with mold and mildew in the house while we lived in it. So, we are trying to keep all moisture out of it as much as possible. I would also love to re-wallpaper the walls since, in the treatment of the house twice for mold and mildew, some of the wallpaper had to be removed from the lower parts of the walls (also visible in this pic). Another reason for taking out the bathroom is that it wasn't convenient to have a bathroom right in our bedroom/living room and it still wouldn't be convenient to have it in the middle of our Sunday school room! We still have an outhouse on the property so that is sufficient for now.
We would also love to begin teen meetings (in the old house) during the week as that is something we headed up during our years of living in the city and working at Krasnoyarsk Baptist Church. We have had several parents mention their desire to see us begin holding these meetings. We need to get an effective heating system installed as soon as possible in order to hold more meetings in the house. Even though the kids are from Siberia, they don't like to be cold! ;)
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| Back to School Sunday - August 2014 |
Please pray for us in the endeavor to purchase the necessary items including radiators, pipes, and all the little parts that are necessary for us to be able to get this project completed before November arrives and the weather gets really cold. I will be sharing this post on our ministry blog as well.
We look forward to posting pictures of the completed project!
