So, we walked out after the fire, got to mom’s and got snowed in. That lasted 2 nights. This morning things had settled down and the roads were normal-for-winter again. So we packed up and headed home by way of the the grocery store and the hardware. Basically, today was expensive, although I ended up being able to pay all but $7 of my groceries with points. So that helped.

The fella I hired to clear the lane worked for 2.5 hours, got stuck 4 times, and ended up making it a little more than halfway. I hadn’t realized he was using a pushplow on a pickup. I figured he’d have a blower. No wonder he got stuck! There is a 4′ drift where he had to give up.

Took 3 trips to from the van to get everything in. Stovepipe ✅️, connector adapter ✅️, 90° elbow✅️, high-temp caulk and caulk gun ✅️, new fire extinguisher ✅️, chicken feed ✅️, 18k bag of dogfood ✅️, cat litter ✅️ groceries✅️, our bags of clothing, diaper bag and pizzas ✅️.

Fed the cats and watered the chickens first. Poor things. Quick pizza lunch, then the kiddos bundled together on the couch under 5 blankets, and we got to work.

The old section of pipe did NOT want to come out. There is nothing to hold onto. Smooth, awkward and heavy, there is no way to really grip the sections. And I am super short, so had no particular leverage. After something over an hour, husband finally wrestled it free. So frustrating. [While he was wrestling with that, I was thoroughly cleaning and scraping out all the parts of the stove one can’t usually get to when the pipe is up. Interestingly, nothing else was particularly dirty. The vertical chimney is clean, the inside of the oven section was way cleaner than I expected, it was JUST the horizontal section that was gunked.]  It took about 5 min to get the new piece on, and another 5 to caulk it in place. Call it 10 min to reassemble the internal sections

Lit the fire (lots of kindling, get it hot fast) and it took nearly 3 hours to build up heat in here. All the same, it did heat, and we are grateful for a warm place to sleep. It was encouraging to see that, even though it was COLD in here, nothing froze, despite being unheated in high winds for 2 days. Yay for our insulation job! We did good!

In an unrelated note, the new plastic on the greenhouse came half-off the night after we put it up, and it’s half-off from the other direction now, also. But it didnt come all the way off, and wind gusts hit 92kmph. Acceptable. I’ll get it put back on again tomorrow if I get a chance.