The changing of the Stove

   This has been an eventful week for the Ark. We had decided to replace our faithful but superannuated Franco Belge cooking woodburner for a more efficient Supra spaceheater, the pic of which you can see above. We had bought the new stove from a local `Things for sale`` site some weeks ago but hadn`t got round to installing it, well, with summer weather, who needs a stove? However, a cooler few days and an alarmist forecaste of snow for Britain had encouraged us to extract the digit, and with the advice of our neighbour Ian, we had commenced the change-over




But first, we had to consider the removal of the old faithful, whose installation had needed four hefty blokes and that was before the wood flooring and fender had been put in... We had an offer of assistance from our friend Clive at Matha to come over Thursday and help budge it but on Wednesday, we commenced the job of lightening the poor old Franco-Belge to make it more portable
   The stove-pipe and cast-iron cooking surfaces were easily removable and then our attention turned to the oven door and iron fire doors, together with the cast-iron frame into which the cooking surfaces fitted. You should have seen Mrs Noah attacking the frame in a berserk frenzy, an alarming sight! Cast-iron is brittle as glass, if hit hard enough and soon all these parts had joined the heap of dismantled scrap piled in the Berlingo. Her attention then turned to the fire-box, also in cast-iron. We were surprised to find this distorted and broken in places and mended with fire cement. Our decision to replace it seemed more and more prudent!  The pieces were prized and broken out and joined the scrap heap.
  Now with Ian`s help we were ready to make the removal. We protected the woodwork with a stout rug and man-handled or rather manandwoman-handled the lightened but still weighty stove end over end out of the chimney breast , across the floor then end over end out of the front door. The mess had to be seen to be believed.... Still, a Dyson soon worked wonders.
  Next day, Ian arrived to help us fit the new, much more portable replacement, which Kim and I had already put in place with the aid of the Diable, not as you might have thought with satanic aid, but by using what we English-speakers call a sack-barrow. Ian contributed a posh, chrome-plated pipe extension and after the hole in the chimney blocking board had been enlarged slightly the connection was made!
   Now it merely remained to try it out....Rather nervously we lit a couple or fire-lighters under bark and twigs and checked for any smoke...no, it caught easily with never a puff, hooray!! We kept it burning until the evening and even with the house door open it gave a good heat, we`re very pleased!
  Phillipe took the dismembered corpse of the Franco Belge away with his tractor, so now we`re all ready for colder weather. Of course, it`s now got very mild, but it will come, sooner or later!

   Bye for now, going to admire the (cold) stove!