Keeping warm with the wood burner

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Once Roger moved out, we were shocked to discover that we were burning £6 worth of gas every day just to stay warm. This doesn’t fit our rather modest household budget, nor our green aspirations. So how do we stay warm in this unseasonably wintry weather?

Although this is a big house, and we know it’s not very well insulated. It doesn’t help that the thermostat for the central heating is in the upstairs bedroom, one of the warmest rooms in the house. You have to put the temperature up quite high to get the large living room downstairs acceptably warm.

Even knowing all that, we were quite taken aback by our first gas bill, and resolved to reduce our consumption. We decided to turn the heating off between 11am and 6pm. As we were still working away at moving all our possessions to their permanent places in the house, that worked quite well. And then the snow came…

Westacre’s wood burner

It got really cold. So we had to turn to our alternative source of heating: the wood burner. So far, it had only ever been used to boost the temperature with the central heating on. Relying on it to keep us warm while the outside temperature barely rose above 2 degrees C is another matter.

We watched in dismay as it snowed outside and the temperature in our living room refused to climb above 14. You may be made out of hardier stuff that I am, but 14 degrees is cold to sit around in.

Then Alex came up with an ingenious idea. He got the electric fan out and started blowing it gently at the wood burner. Blowing the warm air around the room made all the difference. It is now not much warmer outside, but the room is a comfortable 18 degrees. Warm enough with a woolly jumper on, even for me.

We are now looking for one of those wood burner fans that work on the rising heat from the burner itself. It will do the same job as the electric fan, but for free. Does anyone have one of those to spare?

Being with the reality of now

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Full Leaf Moon Things are not going as planned. The Westacre Project is running late. So is the Spring. And doing sunrise meditations isn’t working for me either. I had it all worked out in my head. We’d move from Harrow to Westacre at the Winter Solstice. We would start work on the Westacre project immediately. I [...]

Giving things a second life – can you help?

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Slowly but surely, we are making our home at Westacre, and Roger is settling into the bungalow in the village.

As Roger has just moved from a large 4 bedroom house to a bungalow, he has had to downsize. He has taken quite a lot of his possessions with him, but quite a few things have been left behind at Westacre.

Many pieces of furniture, books, ornaments and gadgets are now sitting in the garage, hoping to find a good new home.We are keen to start our building project, but don’t have anywhere to put tools and supplies until the garage is empty.

Just a corner of the garage

We need to go through what we’ve got and categorise it. Some of it needs to be photographed, measured and put on websites to sell. Other things would do better at a car boot sale.

We could spend a lot of time doing this ourselves, but it would go a lot faster if we had some help.

So if you are at all willing and able, please come and give us a hand. We offer you full board and lodging, if you need it, and our friendship. Plus 50% of the money you make if you manage to sell anything.

If you can help us, please do get in touch. All our contact details are here.

 

Beginning again

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Spring Equinox Have you sat and listened, really listened recently? Even though the air is still cold, and occasionally snow drifts down, the earth is filled with life and expectation. She is well nigh bursting with the urge to grow and unfurl and flower. She is waiting for the right time, for that little bit of [...]

Moving our lives

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Well, we sure have been busy. There has been substantial progress Phase 1 of our project. We finally finished Roger’s bungalow, down to the silicone sealant around the shower tray. And for the last three weeks, we have been moving two households between three houses by means of the Land Rover and a 3m long trailer. We had a deadline to meet as well, as the new tenants are moving into the house in Harrow today.

Finishing ‘the bung’ took so much longer than we had hoped. We missed all the deadlines that we ever tried to put on it. But finally, by the end of February, the last lick of paint was on and it was ready for Roger to move into.

Loading the trailer in the rain

And he has. Several trips with the Tardis and trailer moved all the furniture he needs, and 80 years of possessions and memories packed away in boxes. He is now having a happy time settling in and sorting out.

Meanwhile, Alex and Hilde have so far taken 5 trips up and down the M40 to go and fetch their own lifetime of belongings. Several boxes had already made it to Westacre, but much more had to be fetched, including all our furniture. We worked non stop for two weeks packing, carrying, loading and unloading. For the heaviest items we had help from our friend Matt, and we couldn’t have done it without him.

Less than two weeks ago, we heard that tenants had been found for us, and that they wanted to move in today, 16th March. This made our time scale a litter tighter than we had hoped. As well as all the packing and moving, we spent a day giving our empty house a once-over with fresh paint. It has been professionally cleaned and looks sparkling. Hopefully our tenants will like living there.

Today, Alex and Hilde are having a little break, and are nesting at Westacre. Alex is setting up the new telephone system, and Hilde feels the need to clean things. But we will also have time to just sit around doing not much, and for dinner with friends this evening.

Next on the list is making our bedsit in the big living room, but we’re optimistic about how much space there is. We hope to make it into four separate areas: a bedroom, a living room, a kitchen and a little office corner.

We finally are the occupiers as well as the owners of Westacre. It’s been a long haul. Now the real adventure can begin.

How to welcome the joys of life

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Waxing Root Moon After two months of struggling with my new meditation practice at sunrise and sunset, I’m finally getting the hang of it. My main point of difficulty is the sunrise meditation. I never wake up in the right state of mind to meditate. My thoughts race away with me in all directions. They don’t settle [...]

Imbolc blessings and frustrations

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New Root Moon Imbolc is such a beautiful time of year. I’m cheering on the snow drops beginning to open their petals in the garden. I relish the clarity of the sunshine, on days when we are so blessed. The air is full of the promise of Spring. But at the same time, Winter is still firmly [...]

Heating Westacre

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The problem of how exactly to provide Westacre with heating and hot water is not an easy one to solve. The main difficulty is that there are many unknowns.

Our first strategy for making the house environmentally friendly and cheap to heat is to insulate it as well as we can. We will be installing high spec windows and external wall insulation.

The trouble is that, once all that is in place, it’s hard to know how much heating we’ll actually need. How much heat will we lose on an average day? We won’t really know until we’ve tried it.

Initially, we thought we would have a wood burner with a back boiler to provide us with most of our heating and hot water. The problem with that is that either
1) you have to light fires in the boiler to get hot water, even if it’s warm in the house, and if we don’t need much heating, the room will soon get too hot.
2) you have to install a sophisticated high efficiency burner that will put 90% of its heat in to the boiler. Trouble with those is that we don’t like the sparse aesthetics of them.

In order to give ourselves the rustic looking wood burner we want, as well as a steady temperature in the house, we need to think of some alternatives.

The current idea is to have more solar hot water panels on the roof, so that most of our hot water and heating comes from that source. And for insurance against many consecutive days without sun, we’ll need a bigger heat store than we originally planned.

Heat stores work like this:

We were originally thinking of having a heat store with a 300 litre capacity. Now we’re considering 1000 litres.

These things are big. I’d even say huge. At 2.1m high and with 1.05m diametre, they take up a lot of space.

So where in the house can we lose one of those?

The thinking continues.

Restless mornings

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Waning Maiden Moon I’m not having an easy time meditating these days. I just don’t seem to be able to concentrate, and whatever I’m doing in the bungalow seems to bleed into my meditation time. Now, it’s hardly surprising that my mind is a touch restless. Life is rather stressful at the moment. In no-man’s land somewhere [...]

What is happening where? Westacre, Harrow and the bungalow

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When you are living in the middle of a huge life change, everything seems pretty straightforward. But I can imagine that, from the outside looking in, our madness can be a touch confusing. So here it is, for the sake of clarity.

1. Roger’s bungalow.This will be Roger’s new home. He bought it about a year ago and we started renovating it about 6 months ago.

Roger’s bungalow, aka ‘the bung’.

We could have given it a lick of paint and Roger could have moved in months ago, but Roger wanted some alterations, and once we started taking down partitions, we discovered that quite a lot of things could do with replacement and repairs.
So some walls have come down and new ones have gone in. Alex has completely replaced the water and central heating pipework. The front door and porch have been moved, and French windows added at the back. The place has been completely rewired and replastered by professionals.
Things have taken rather longer than we expected at the bungalow, but it has all been very useful experience. Now we are at the decoration stage at last. We are hoping to move Roger into his new home at the beginning of February.

2. Westacre.This is the house where Alex grew up. It has been Roger’s home for over 40 years. Alex and Hilde bought it about a year ago, and intend to make our home and our life here.

Westacre

While ‘the bung’ is awaiting completion, Westacre is still Roger’s home. Alex and Hilde are staying here as his guests, and everything pretty much still looks like it always did. Once Roger and his belongings move out, Alex and Hilde can start thinking about making it their own.
The first stage will be to turn the big living room into a bedsit apartment, where we will live while we do the big Westacre eco-renovation project.

3. Harrow. This was Alex and Hilde’s home for 17 years. Once we have moved our belongings to Westacre and done some necessary maintenance, we will let this house, hopefully to some nice long term tenants.

Our house in Harrow

About 6 weeks ago, we replaced the original wooden windows with UPVC and double glazing so our tenants can keep their heating bills low.
When the winter weather clears, we will be taking frequent journeys with the TARDIS and its trailer to transport our belongings up the M40, saying our final goodbyes to Harrow.

Right now, we are working towards a 1st February deadline to complete work in the bungalow. We are making good progress, and are hopeful we will make it. We need to
– finish tiling in the shower room and en suite.
– install the last bits of bathroom furniture.
– put down wooden floors in the living room and hall area.
– paint most of the walls.
– lay carpets.

It’s all very satisfying work and we are still enjoying ourselves doing it all. Which is just as well, because once this is finished, we start all over again at Westacre.