Having a fireplace saves us a lot of money.
We have ten acres of wooded property and during late summer we start gathering all of the downed wood from the summer storms.
We bring it in and stack it up along the house so we don’t need to worry about getting to the woodshed when it is snowing. Unfortunately, this year, we didn’t have enough wood stacked along the house to keep the fireplace burning. I was outside gathering wood in the wheelbarrow and bringing it up from the woodshed. My husband brought it up from the shed while I was stacking another wheelbarrow full. We were about halfway done when it began to snow. I didn’t think it was supposed to snow and neither did my husband. Within two minutes, it went from snow flurries to a near white out. He ran into the house and I settled in the wood shed to wait out the snow. I could finally see the smoke coming from the chimney and I knew the snow was about done. I headed up to the house just in time to see my husband come flying out. The fireplace had sparked up during the snowstorm and it ended up catching the rug on fire. He had already called the fire company because the living room had been gutted before he got out of the house. He grabbed my purse and the car keys so we could get in the car and stay warm. I guess we shouldn’t have worried about wood for the fireplace. Our worrying about not using the furnace and saving some money, almost cost us our entire home.