Fireplaces

It’s almost Peter’s birthday, and one of my gifts to him is a pallet of bricks.

Does that seem a bit mean, giving a man a pile of bricks for his birthday?

Well, these are no ordinary bricks. They are FIREbricks, or refractory bricks. And the plan is to create one monster of a pizza oven. The kind of pizza oven that draws friends and relatives from interstate to marvel at its construction and to taste of its fruits. (Well, taste of its pizzas.).

We have the plans, we have the will, and now we have the most essential component of a good brick oven. But before even commencing the project, I am asking myself guiltily: How many fireplaces/woodstoves/wood heaters can a single family even JUSTIFY?

Here is the count so far. We have an Everhot woodstove from the 1970s in our cabin for cooking and to supply the cabin’s hot water. Because it wasn’t sufficient to heat our cabin during winter, we also built a rocket stove (more about that elsewhere on our site). So, that’s two, just in our temporary shelter.

In our main house, we have our pride and joy, the Esse 990 woodstove. With its 3 ovens, massive stoveplate, and built-in water jacket for heating the household water, this wood-consumer is more than worth its weight in gold. (And it weighs half a tonne. We know, since we shifted into our house ourselves.). Despite all of its strengths, it is not a space-heater, so we also needed a wood heater. Enter our Quadrafire 430. Also indispensible. Winters would be (and were) miserable without it.

So, that’s four. And now we are building a pizza oven. Five.

And we ALSO have plans to build a sauna. Six.

Ever since we moved to Tasmania, collecting firewood has been an ongoing, year-round priority. One of the joys of moving into our main house has been having a solar hot water system; for the first time in 5 years, we have not needed to burn wood all year round for hot water. On the whole, for more than half of the year, we don’t need to light a fire. I cannot really convey just how much of a difference this has made to our lives.

But now, I’ve started thinking about the pizza oven. A pizza oven means SUMMERTIME wood consumption again.

In my secret imaginings, I see friends coming for a pizza dinner in the summertime, when the sun stays in the sky until 9 o’clock at night. I imagine us sitting in the sauna later, chatting, then jumping into the pond, then back into the dry heat of the sauna. I imagine our friends making their way over to the cabin to stay the night. And even in the heat of summer, all this is only possible with firewood. Firewood for the pizza oven. Firewood for the sauna stove. Firewood to heat the water in our cabin.

We are fortunate to be on a bush block with lifetimes of firewood, if managed properly. But it still feels simultaneously gluttonous and HARD WORK to have so many fireplaces.

It’s not going to stop us from building the pizza oven. (Not now that we have the firebricks, anyway). It probably won’t stop us from building the sauna, either. But it’s interesting that these projects which I associate with a more luxurious lifestyle- pizza ovens, saunas- will also mean extra, ongoing WORK.

But really, maybe that’s how it should be. It’s so easy to get into the habit of an excessive lifestyle when we can’t see or experience the costs of our excesses. At least this way, we really consider before taking action: how much do we really feel like pizza? 😉