Negative air pressure in the house brings air in through the largest opening - the chimney. It makes quite a smokey smell in the house. I like it, but it was making Brian sick. There’s no problem as long as there’s a fire, but when there’s no fire, the smell is all over the house. We’ve read online that lighting a candle and placing it in the fireplace will help (since it draws air from the house and “up” the chimney). So far, it’s reduced the smell enough for Brian. It’s not a bad smell, just smokey.

Let me just start with the preface that despite 3 decades on this planet, I’ve never lit a fire in a fireplace. I had them growing up, but that was in Texas - it was never lit in 10 years of living there. My mom mentioned a fireplace when we lived in Philly, but that was long before I was old enough to even be near a fire, much less operate the fireplace and start a fire by myself. We had a chimney sweep come by last week to clean out the chimney and make sure it was safe to light fires in. Last night, I lit a fire in our new home - it was fun (it doesn’t hurt that I’m borderline pyro and like fires in general ).

The flue is annoying and hard to adjust. I know it’s supposed to keep the house warmer if it’s closed (when a fire’s not burning), but ours doesn’t seem to actually “close”, although it opens just fine.

Firewood needs both air and to be close to other firelogs. Brian had sort of showed me how to lay the logs on the “stand” in the fire place. Kinda like a triangle, and he said that there needed to be air between them, so I spread them out as far as reasonable. I learned later that no, they should be touching, but with air gaps between them. Just not as big of air gaps as I gave them.

Magazines burn just as well as newspaper. There was only one small newspaper in the recycling bin, so I resorted to magazines and junk mail for tinder. It works just fine, but you get some funky flame colors at first…

We need to buy more wood. There’s a pretty small pile of wood left by the previous owners, and we were using that. Very dry, easy to catch on fire, and old.

Wood is expensive. A cord of wood delivered (to the driveway) is $253. However, according to google, we should really only need 1/2 to 3/4 of a cord of wood per winter. The half cord was more expensive per cord than the whole cord. We have the storage for a full cord, might as well. Not only that, but it gets delivered to the driveway. We have to carry it a few pieces at a time back to the wood piles in the back yard. Oh well, it counts as exercise.

I fail at keeping the flames going. Brian is much better at it than I am. Every time I touched the fire, the flames would die down (not stop, it was quite hot at that point), and I’d yell to Brian that the fire was broke and would he come fix it please. I think I just need to learn how to manage the fire better and then I’ll get higher flames when I try.