I grew up in an old farmhouse in the rural country, which afforded me lots of hiking and camping opportunities as a kid.
However, our house was falling apart in a lot of ways. My mom wanted my father to make improvements as time went on, but he kept making excuses all of the time not to fix a hole in the attic or a leaking pipe in the basement. It’s hard to have patience with a man like this when he works in the construction industry in the first place, often possessing the exact skills required for seeing these jobs through to completion. The only thing he was good about was chopping wood in the autumn, winter, and spring seasons. One advantage of living on a rural property with a lot of forested acres was the unbridled access to free firewood. So many trees grew up out of the ground like weeds that we would have never run out of firewood living at that property, and that’s just from harvesting from trees that have already hit the ground on their own accord. Since temperatures regularly dropped below zero for upwards to five months out of the year, we burned through a lot of firewood. We had a central furnace that ran on propane, but the cost of gas is always expensive in rural areas especially. Instead of just burning the wood in the old fireplace, we got a wood stove instead. Heat rises, so a lot of the heat energy generated by a fire in a fireplace just goes up the chimney and is lost in the process. A wood stove emits a lot more heat energy via radiant transfer just based on how one is designed.