If it had only stayed put one more minute!

Last week, I mentioned I needed to get the wood stove cleaned before the weather turned cold. On Wednesday morning, I tackled that job. Rick stayed to help and it’s a good thing he did. 

I have quite an elaborate setup before I start cleaning because I want to mitigate the mess as much as possible. I told Rick I wouldn’t need him for a bit while I got the plastic hung up to stop the soot from going into the bedroom, the paper on the floor to catch any that fell and the garbage sack handy to put the pipes into when I took them apart. 

We have two 90º elbows in our stovepipe, which can be a pain when it is time to clean, but it needs to be that way to get the stove far enough away from the wall. So, I pulled the pipe loose from the back of the stove, then pulled it out of the top elbow, which goes right up into the chimney. I turned to set the right-angled set of pipes I had in my hand on the stovetop and before I could get turned back, the elbow dropped out of the pipe and hit the floor. That elbow tends to catch soot, so it was fairly full, and all that soot shot out of that elbow… all over me, the floor and the wall, which was not covered in paper. Literally, that whole corner of the wall turned black. It was absolutely covered in fluffy, black soot that poofs and tracks, and goes everywhere. 

Fortunately, Rick was in earshot and came when I hollered to see if I was all right. He didn’t laugh out loud, but I am sure he was chuckling inside as he stood there looking at the blackened wall, the floor and most of all, his wife. He took the pipes outside and then went for the shop vac, which is the only way to clean up that stuff. Between the two of us, we managed to suck up most of it and I sent Rick out to clean the pipes out while I finished vacuuming up the wall and the floor in the corner. 

While he was out cleaning pipes, I decided to go ahead and clean inside the stove. See, we had kind of a mystery, a bird came down out stovepipe this summer and I was sure he would be in the elbow. He was not. I looked down the back of the stove where the smoke comes out, nope, no bird there either. On a wood cook stove, the smoke travels around the oven to heat it, so periodically that all has to be cleaned, too. I proceeded to scrape the sides down and then started on the bottom, scraping the soot and ashes out into a baking pan to be taken out to the ash barrel. But still, I didn’t find the bird, though I was sure he was why there was so much soot in there. I had noticed some anomalies in the ashes on top of the oven though, and although I didn’t see how the bird could have done it, I started to think he had managed to get to the fire box. Sure enough, when I opened the door, there he was, the poor thing. He had reached the end of the line there.

Sorry, this story was just too long, so no recipe this week.