La Petite Godin

If you think you've had it bad this winter, please go to Peggy's blog. Peggy lives in south Scotland, where it rains or snows most of the time. After a brief report about damp, she moves on to how much it's costing them to heat their home and drive their cars. A full tank of heating oil cost her about US$1500, and ONE lousy gallon of gas ( at the U.S. measurement) costs her more than US$8....Yowzah!

Just about everybody's house had oil heat when I was a kid, and my dad could fill the tank of our 1936 Plymouth for a couple of dollars. Until OPEC retaliated for our support of Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur war by quadrupling the price of oil, the U.S. had enjoyed a long period of cheap gas & oil. To deal with the higher prices, President Richard M. Nixon and Congress in 1974 passed a federal law aimed at forcing people to economize on the highway, at least. (For which God bless Richard Nixon and absolve him from all his sins.) The law lowered the national speed limit on the highways to 55 mph. In 1987, the law was amended to allow the individual states to set their own speed limits within their borders. And in the early 1990s, the SUV craze hit. The highway economy act was on the books, at least, until 1995. And we know what a mess we're in now.

In 1978, when we moved to our big old Iowa house, it was heated by fuel oil. The tank held 300 gallons, and one gallon cost about 30 cents. A fill cost about $90. The furnace was made by Coleman, the camp stove people. It was about as effective as a camp stove for heating the 11-room house, too. The flexible tubing leading from the furnace to outlets (less than 11, btw...some rooms didn't have any) were a bit skinnier in diameter and thickness than the flexible tubing leading from a modern clothes dryer to the basement window. We ran the furnace full blast night and day, but the temperature never got much over 55 degrees F. inside the house. To achieve this mirage of central heating, we used two tanks of fuel per month. The price of fuel doubled the next winter, so while I was home recovering from surgery on my eye socket, I hatched a plan to replace the totally ineffective furnace and ductwork and install a wood-burning stove in the parlor to supplement it.

The girls' pals Andrea and Cathy's dad and his dad installed the ductwork, which took at least a month longer than anyone estimated or expected because there had never BEEN a need--or space--for heating ducts of any kind in 1853-1855, when the house, one of the first in town, was built. The new furnace's duct work in the basement was made out of sturdy metal sheeting and the sharp corners stuck down so much lower than the old flexible tubes that our wonderful plumber, who was my coworker Ruth's dad, smacked his head on it when he came to install the new water heater and bled all over the basement floor.

Next, we went to the woodburning stove shop in La Crosse and bought a Le Petite Godin wood & coal stove. That particular stove had been designed in the 1700s but manufactured in modern-day France. While doing my research, I learned that the best stoves were all of ancient design. Once people figured out how to make a good stove that was fuel-efficient but gave great warmth, they stuck with it.

To set it up in the parlor, which was the central room downstairs, we needed to rebuild part of the chimney in the attic and build a nonflammable stand for the stove on the wooden floor. Dave and Jim, two of the best carpenters in the whole world, acquired the broken slate bed of a pool table and trimmed it to a nice square, which they set up on 1x2's as a platform. They fixed the chimney, set the stove on the chunk of pool table, installed the stovepipe, and hooked it all up.

I forget where we got the first load of wood, but our first fire was not the aesthetic delight we had been dreaming of. The stove, after it was manufactured, had been coated with something like mineral oil or petroleum jelly to prevent rust. This had to burn off first, so we had some ugly smoke floating around for the first few hours of the fire.

The result was we had to open the windows and doors to keep from suffocating, and there were many frowns and shrugs among the residents until it became clear that the stove actually would give off heat (not make it even colder) and not toxic fumes. When the last of the lube had burned off, Patches, the dog, peed on the stove. This was his way of claiming it for his own--or may for OUR own. I think dogs and cats are much more attuned to human thoughts and feelings than we realize. "Hey! We got a new stove! There! Now everyone will know it's ours."

Cast iron wood stove
PETIT GODIN 3720

The residents complained a bit that the stove, which I fired up every morning with oak scraps from the Stave Company in Anamosa, did its job too well. "Mom, it's 95 degrees in here!" The little wood stove kept the whole house liveable, and when the fire finally died down in the wee hours of the morning, the furnace would kick on maybe once, around 4 a.m., which kept the water pipes from freezing.

Since the oak scraps from the stave company cost us about $3 for a whole trunkful--enough to last the week if we used Peggy's old graduation present of a car, which had belonged to Steve and Elaine, our landlords on the farm, where we lived before we moved into town--our heating bill went down to practically nothing.

Nobody liked to make the weekly run to the Stave Company, but we did it. And we got through.