I have a workshop. It’s pretty crude but I keep working on it. It’s a single stall and it was never great for winter. I’ve insulated and upgraded but it’s only half the battle. When it’s mid-winter I need a shit-ton of BTUs to warm up the shop.
About ten years ago I resurrected an antique woodstove I’d scrounged years before. Despite being not much more than a pile of parts, I assembled it (and replaced the single part I couldn’t find). Then I fretted over chimney stuff and beefed up the wall behind the stove. The end result is that ten years ago I had a woodstove capable of heating my shop. I named her Betsy. (Back in the day, I gave Betsy her own search category.)
That dumb little woodstove has created its own history. Here’s a photo from 2015, right after Betsy had her first fire in probably 30 years.
Here’s me rambling about wood heat in 2017:
As the “internet of things” approaches its final conclusion and nothing works at all, I’ll happily cook bacon and eggs over wood heat while the rest of the word needs broadband to toast bread.
Here’s what I thought was going to be the last photo of my beloved dog in 2018. Fortunately it wasn’t, though inevitably the dog is now gone and deeply missed.
Here’s a wood measuring box I made in 2019. (The top “window” measures for my house stove and the one on the side is roughly analogous to Betsy’s diminutive firebox.) That box is still around.
Remember 2019? What would we have done if we’d known what 2020 would bring? How does one prepare for the (temporary?) end of reason? I guess maybe by having a woodstove. Hard to say. We all lived through it, and we’re all still figuring out what it all means.
Yes, I like my stove very much. It always has a percolator nearby. It always cheers me up.
Betsy is inefficient and wasteful of shop space. I don’t care. I like having a woodstove. What better reason could possibly exist for having one? Betsy makes me just plain happy.
Sadly, things deteriorate when ignored. (Perhaps something we learned about society in 2020?)
My shop has been pushed to the limits. It has been used for everything. I’ve built a boat, tweaked a dirt bike, fumbled about learning hand carved dovetails, butchered big game, welded shit, disassembled a snowmobile, etc… When you’ve done this, done that, and done everything else in the same workspace chaos ensues.
Over time, my beloved Betsy wound up buried under layers of tools and… well crap. You could almost do an archaeological dig of my shop and figure out what project happened in what order and what tools were used in what eras.
I also learned that a woodstove in a garage is not a modern furnace. Betsy can heat the shop during winter but it requires daily or at least semi-daily interaction. When I let the shop get cold during the week I can’t quite bring the items in the shop up to useable temps on a short weekend. (This isn’t a June problem but it’s a January kill shot.) Imagine 60 degree air temps but picking up a wrench that’s iced down to 20 degrees. I can’t get much done under those circumstances.
By design or not, things change. This winter I will have more time and less money. And this fall I’m too sick to abandon the shop and go rambling across Wyoming or whatever (like I did last year). Since “winter is coming”, I started cleaning my garage.
What a huge endeavor. Totally exhausting! And I’m still not done!
I have more tools than a single stall can easily hold so it’s like Tetris / Jenga / Freecell. Empty this place to move that thing to somewhere so that I can access the thing underneath it… only to think “where the hell do I put this?”
Plus I’ve got many bits of wood and leftover this and that. This isn’t “junk” it’s “supplies”! Every man knows short lengths of 2″x4″s and cans of old bolts are the foundation of civilization. But nothing ventured nothing gained. Bravely, I tossed a lot of “valuable” stuff. I need a warm winter workshop more than I need stacks of materials and broken gadgets. Still, it was hard.
Even after lots of effort, I’m only half done. But there’s time. It’s only September. It’s not winter… yet.
Then came the second part of today’s story. It was a cold rainy afternoon as I was hauling shit out to the truck (and messing with Packout labels). Eventually, after significant effort, I’d completely cleared Betsy. I was chilly and grumpy, why not start a fire?
I tossed bits of old studs and some scraps of firewood into Betsy and she fired up just like new. Something happened… all the stress and effort of cleaning vanished. Poof!
I pulled up a battered lawn chair, tuned the shop radio to something nice, and became an entirely new man… I was flat out in meditative heaven!
Mrs. Curmudgeon came home from work, entirely chilled and just as grump as I’d been an hour previous. I gently cajoled her into joining me in my (still very dusty and only half de-cluttered) shop. I set out her favorite lawn chair and tossed another piece of scrap wood into Betsy. You could almost literally see the stress fading in Mrs. Curmudgeon’s shoulders.
I scampered off to fetch my camping percolator, a jug of water, some hot cocoa, and the dog.
Mrs. Curmudgeon was happy. I was happy. The dog was ecstatic sniffing the massive complexity of an old shop. Then she (the dog not Mrs. Curmudgeon) inspected a pile of ten year old bits of firewood that were jackstrawed by the stove, selected the best one, and settled down to gleefully chew it to bits. I noticed with both sorrow and joy that our dog was laying right where an earlier and equally beloved dog had lain.
Cocoa is always better when warmed over wood heat. It was sublime. Our environment of a cracked cement sawdust covered floor and hastily stacked wrenches was more than the sum of its parts. It was as comfortable as a warm blanket.
We spent several hours just sitting by the fire. It was a perfect moment.
You can’t buy that kind of happiness. You can build it, if you’re lucky. I was feeling particularly grateful.
I’m glad Betsy is back on-line! It’s a win. I’ve gained rather than lost. I’ve restored what was (temporarily) useless. I’ve reestablished delight out of dusty old metal. I turned junk wood into welcoming heat. I brewed cocoa and it tasted like joy. None of this required money, only work… and time.
Winter may suck but I’ve got a better attitude about it. I’m daydreaming of percolated coffee in a warm toasty woodshop. I wish I could share my optimism with y’all. Can you feel it? All it took was a cheery fire and some cocoa to turn me into a kid dreaming about Christmas.
“Plus I’ve got many bits of wood and leftover this and that. This isn’t “junk” it’s “supplies”! Every man knows short lengths of 2″x4″s and cans of old bolts are the foundation of civilization.”
Truer words have never been spoken. Must be that time of year since I started “cleaning” my garage this weekend.
The pre-winter scramble. 🙂
Junk is what you throw away about 2 weeks before you need it. And, of course, if you DO retain some, then you’ll need one more item than you kept when you finally get around to using them.
Ask me how I know …
Phil B
Yeah, junk is like that… useless until it’s not there and you wish you’d kept it.
One development is that I’m discovering 3d printing can fill in certain gaps. We all have a lot of “keep this gadget because it goes with item X and if I lose it, I probably won’t find a replacement”. Isn’t that the basis of every kitchen junk drawer? Now I look at stuff and think “how hard would it be to replicate this particular whatzit”? If it’s mostly angular and simple I just toss it because I can probably make another from scratch. (It’s a sliding scale, it’s still pretty hard to replicate stuff… but I’m getting better with practice.)
Excellent post sir. Kent in Michigan
Thanks!
Thanks for those mental images. I have a sign somewhere “Messy productivity is better than tidy idleness”. Your shop sounds perfect.
My so-called workshop has a highly efficient 50-year-old “airtight” woodstove (thanks, Dad!) that is a delight to snuggle up to in a rocking chair. Sadly, attempts to cook on it fail as it just ain’t meant for that. If SHTF this winter, I’ll be eating cans of cold beans and sleeping by the toasty stove. Mmm, toast. Now I’m hungry.
I still haven’t mastered cooking on my kitchen stove but maybe I will someday. It certainly isn’t airtight either. (On the other hand, my in-house woodstove has excellent reburn and really is airtight.)
I hope someday to put a pot of beans in the stove’s “oven” and let it simmer while I fiddle fart around my shop for several hours. Time will tell.
Nice.
Thanks.
i go out to my shop much the same way, with intentions of wood working, turning wrenches or just organizing the shop. but usually i take a shot of jaeger, build a fire, and end up sitting by the stove staring at the list of stuff i need to do. riverrider
That might be my plan for the winter. There’s a certain wisdom in it.
I had a 40×60 barn when I lived in the country. We even lived in one end while building my wife’s “dream home!” I told my boys “if anybody asks if you were born in a barn tell them, no but I lived in one for a while.” When the wife decided we needed to move back to town so I could remodel a 100 year old farmhouse, her new dream home, I traded the big barn for a 24x 30. Had to downsize my tools a lot. I do have my grandpa on my mother’s side Warm Morning pot belly stove that they made it through the depression with in the corner. It’s my happy place in the winter! F. Hubert
A wood stove and a happy dog.
How much more do you need?
A warming post in many ways.
Thanks buddy
Glad you liked it.
I am both envious and thankful that where I live (south Texas), such frigid temperatures do not exist. We don’t have a wood burning stove, but have a heavy steel bar-b-que pit for cooking meals. Not often used, especially now when meat price is up in the atmosphere. A small fire burned in the backyard when there is chill in the air is fantastic. Watching burning embers fly up into the air, with the occasional *pop* from the mesquite shooting into the adjacent grass. Peace – yes, wood fueled fires bring that out.
Great post – Thank You for writing it.
Thanks.
Yep, cleaning the workbench is a form of time travel.
Great story. I like that the stove had magic soothing powers over not only you but Mrs. C and the dog too.
Is the pup a Pyrenees, AC?
Mine is sadly gone now too. It seems like yesterday, but it’s been two years and I still miss the big wooly galoot…
Love the stove, love the dog. 😊
Yep, a Great Pyrenees. They’re good dogs. I miss my last Great Pyrenees even as I lavish attention on my current one.
Time flies. I remember most of those posts.