A stove to warm us

It's been almost a week since we had the first snow of 2011 and there is still wintery stuff on the ground, which meant there wasn't much work on the house this week until the past two days. On Thursday, Ashley braved our roof and scraped off ice and snow so the roofing guys could work. Now the majority of the house sits under its shiny tin roof.

The back of our property has a lot of shade--and it's more apparent now that the ice and snow won't melt!

Our doors are up. Unfortunately they're in the wrong place and will have to be switched. This is the 3/4 light that is supposed to be our front door. Right now it's the back door (leading onto the screen porch). The backdoor is a full light--but now that I see the 3/4 light I wish we had two of those. Oh well!

The biggest development this week was the completion of our fireplace and installation of the wood-burning stove. This turned into a much more complicated task than we originally imagined because there are a lot of codes related to how to install a Jotul stove. The cold temps and winter weather made it near impossible for the brick masons to finish the fireplace. They finished bricking on Friday night and then Ashley ran two jet heaters all night to make sure the mortar would dry in time for the scheduled stove installation Saturday morning. When Ashley sent a picture of the stove to our contractor, Peb texted back "Thought this day would never come." We thought about telling him we didn't like and wanted it torn out (joking). We're really pleased how it turned out!

The small door to the left of the stove is where we'll have a hatch to slide wood in from our porch. The built-in for our TV will disguise this.

View of the living room from standing in the dining room.

The pipe for the stove runs up through Levi's room (see the shiny pipe in the wall).

The back door, which is really our front door.

We've been very lucky so far to only have work delayed by weather a few days. Up until this point, it's rained on the weekends occasionally but the work week has been clear. So if we can make it until the end with only a few delays, we'll be happy!