The new stove has been standing in the corner of our living room for four weeks waiting for the day it gets plumbed in and starts heating the house. It patiently waited while yours truely smashed five decades of bad design into smithereens and also watched as the builder patched everything up. But this weekend saw us finally get the thing in and fired up.

First things first though, the floor needed to be laid and a quick trip to the DIY store saw us on our hands and knees spreading the toxic cement and laying tiles. Unfortunately the fumes got the better of me and after a space walk round the garden in the fresh and passing out for two and a half hours the floor was set.

We shoe-horned the stove into the tight space and cemented it in (making sure the cementing process was carried out in a well ventilated room this time) and fired the stove up. It took a little while to understand how the vents control the fire within but once that was figured out we were well away, nipping into the newly created wood store for supplies.

The oil fueled heating system has remained off these past couple of evenings as the stove is filled up more and more with scrap wood and now for the first time this winter I’m sat writing this in a nice warm front room hypnotised by the flames and thinking of the benefits this cast iron box of fire brings with it. Now thats got to be worth a famous five minute scribble in the notebook.

Theres still a few holes to brick up as they were needed to cement the flue in but I think it looks brilliant even though its not finished.