’nuff said.

Or maybe not: This, folks, is the number one way of feeling self sufficient, to my way of thinking. This is a Lopi Endeavor woodburning stove, and as far as I’m concerned it’s one of the most useful objects I’ve ever purchased. Woodheat.org says the brand of stove doesn’t matter as long as it’s EPA certified, but having grown up with wood heat and having heated my own home thus for the past five years, I like this stove.

Of course, other elements help. It’s dead center in the house, lives on the main floor atop a 631-lb slab of slate, and is backed up with 1.5 tons of dressed fieldstone behind. A straight shot o’chimney ensures I always have good draw, central placement helps with heat distribution, and all that mass keeps the house warm when the stove’s not.

Gather ’round, kids, it’s story time. When we first moved up here years ‘n years ago, we bought an old frame house in town. It was built in 1924 and still had the original single-pane wood windows, and virtually no insulation. (In fact when we started insulating the house, inside the walls we found Saturday Evening Posts discussing Hitler’s invasion of Poland.) Our old furnace worked as hard as it could, but when the weather really got cold and the wind howled, it just couldn’t keep up.

One night around Christmas the power went out. It woke me up because the sound of the laboring furnace had been our constant companion for days. I lay there and felt the house getting colder and colder, and thought, what do I do if the power doesn’t come back on? The only thing I could think of was to load the kids and their blankets in the car and take them up to the church, hoping it would be warmer there.

When the power came on, I was changed. No longer, if I could help it, would my family be completely dependent on the power company for their survival. That winter we installed a gas stove that would run when the power was out, and in the spring we insulated the house as much as possible. But we later opted out of that house in favor of a newer, tighter home with a wood stove installed. Years later when we started sketching out this house, a central wood burning stove was one of the first elements in the design. We’re grateful for a tight house with a generator, a wood stove well supplied, food storage, and everything you’re reading about here.

Now, let the winds blow! We can stay warm and dry, cook, eat, bathe, even play computer computer games for months on end with no contact with the outside world. And should the propane fail, our wood stove even has a cook top.