One Thing Leads to Another
If you caught our last video, you’ll know we abruptly decided to have a wood stove installed after going a week without power in February. If the past year has taught us anything, it’s that bad things can and will happen sometimes, often one right after another, and it’s helpful to follow those little inklings that tell us to make sure we’ve got the basics covered in case of emergencies.
So instead of rebuilding our front porch like we originally planned, we decided to redirect our funds and energy toward making this wood stove thing happen, which necessitated a few alterations to our kitchen in order to give our dining room, where the wood stove was going to live, a little more breathing room.
We called around, got quotes, and chose a nice, basic stove (the True North TN20) to heat our 1600 square feet. It’s mobile-home friendly, efficient, and has a nice, flat cooktop with plenty of space for heating up pots of water or soup in case *knock on wood* the power goes out for an extended period of time again.
We scheduled the install for as soon as they could fit us in, which only gave us a couple weeks to work. We wanted to remove the floating cabinets between the kitchen and dining room, switch out our tiny, two-bowl sink with a larger one-bowl model with nicer fixtures, and replace the existing counters with DIY wood counters that wouldn’t have the same bar overhang. This loss of counter width would add roughly 18 inches to the dining room, which doesn’t seem like much, but actually makes quite a big difference overall.
Originally that was all we were going to do, but one thing led to another and another until we found ourselves addressing the entire kitchen.
Thankfully, we were able to wrap up the bulk of the kitchen work in time for the installation, but it still isn’t fully finished. We have more painting to do, more light fixtures to install, a bit more work on the counters, and some detail work here and there, but we are quite happy with how things have shaped up overall. The entire space has brightened, and I feel much more at home and inspired to cook now.
As for the wood stove, we couldn’t be happier with it. And the weather was cool enough for most of March and April that we were able to use it as our primary heat source for several weeks. Would you like to take a peek at all the changes we made to our kitchen? Watch it all happen in our latest video below: