Did that really happen?

Have you ever had something happen that made you look back and say “Did that really just happen”?  We had one of those this weekend. 

The story began on Saturday when Jeremy was reading the Merc News classifieds.  Someone posted a free wood burning stove and said that it weighs 450 lbs so come prepared to move it.  We’ve known that we want to heat with wood for a long time, so naturally Jeremy called to see if it was available.  We were figuring it would be a cheap cast iron barrel type stove, or an older and broken down regular stove.  We've called on stoves like this several times before and had yet to find something in working order.  Then the owner tells us it’s a soapstone wood stove that needs a new damper.  Soapstone stoves are usually really nice so we were very interested.  She also tells us that someone else has called to come look at it.  Disappointed but thinking quickly, Jeremy says that if that falls through she should give us a call.

Fast forward to Sunday.  We are resting after picking up the wood from storage that will hopefully form the bottom rail of the greenhouse later this week.  It’s hot and we are planning to work on sorting out the usable from the burnable in this large stack of boards in the back of the truck for the afternoon.  We’re tired from picking them up (pressure treated lumber is not light) and debating how much we’re really going to do this afternoon.  Then the phone rings.  It’s the lady with the woodstove saying that the first person can’t come look at it this weekend and she really wants it gone so do we want to come see it.  How can we turn that down?  If it’s in any kind of decent shape, it would make a wonderful stove for our house for FREE! 

We’re thinking about how we might get this stove home if it’s a good one and we decide it would be much easier to borrow my brother’s trailer with the ramp so that we could use a dolly to load it (remember it weighs 450 lbs).  We give him a call and explain what’s going on.  My amazing brother says,” the trailer’s not here but we can load it in my truck.  Brandon is here too and we have to go up to that part of town [where the stove is] anyway so if it looks good we’ll just swing by there and meet you.”  Really?!?!?!?!  We couldn’t believe our luck – with 4 adults surely we can get it up into a truck bed.

We get to the house and take a look at the stove.  The exposed cast iron frame has rusted a little bit – just on the surface though.  It will easily come off with a wire brush.  The inside looks great, all the knobs turn easily, glass is intact and it even comes with the flu pipe and back heat shield.  All the soapstone on the sides and top is intact, no cracks or dings.  It’s a great stove that cleaned up is going to be beautiful.  We can't believe it.  We say we’ll take it, get back in the car and call Scott to set up a time to come back for the stove.

The stove as we first saw it

We agree to meet up at 2:00.  Everything went mostly smoothly, although the stove was amazingly heavy.  We removed everything that could be removed to help make it marginally lighter before the big lift.  The 3 men in the group (Jeremy, Brandon and Scott) managed to pick it up and get it into the truck bed with only a little bit of swearing and one make-your-breath-catch moment where we thought it was going to fall on Jeremy. The unloading was less eventful and we now have a soapstone wood stove in our garage.   It was heavy.  Did I mention that it was solid cast iron with stone inlaid on 4 sides?  450 lbs was probably a slight understatement.  There’s no way we would have been able to move it without all 3 guys to help.  We can’t thank Scott and Brandon enough.

Removing as much weight as possible

Oh my god this is heavy!!

We made it to the tailgate...

Ready for the ride home...maybe it should just stay there.

We did a little research online later that night to see how much a stove like this would retail for.  As near as we can guess, the modern equivalent to this stove (ours was made in about 1992) retails for $2800.  Ours will need a damper, some quality time with a wire brush, some stove black and little bit of TLC on the stones before it’s in like-new shape, but I suspect our total investment will come out much less than $2800.  ;-)

This is a new stove of the same type.  Hopefully ours will look like this when its all cleaned up.

The cavalry that rode in to save the day!

The rest of the evening we just kept looking at each other in disbelief.  Did that really just happen?  Did we really just get an awesome woodstove for free?    How is this possible?  I checked this morning and it’s still in the garage – we didn’t dream the whole thing.  That really did just happen.  Amazing.