If you’re just tuning in, we’re recounting our BTU journey through the years. We started with bankruptcy and electric baseboard heat, which is more or less the same thing. Now we’re moving on to burning firewood, and anything else made of anything combustible that will fit through a one-foot square furnace door. We’ve purchased a semi-broken floor model of a big ol’ wood burning furnace, and a freight company has dutifully plopped it on a sheet of ice in my dooryard.

I called my family over to the window to look at it. “There it is, boys and girls. Real heat is over there. It’s only a matter of going.”

It was late winter already. The snow comes and goes, receding like a tide. It tricks you into thinking it’s leaving for good, and then you wake up and it’s back with its family in tow. Sometimes you’d get a foot of a dusting.

Other times you’d get eighteen inches of partly cloudy.

That hump you see at the end of the driveway was the real problem. That’s the end of the driveway that leads down to the back of the house, and that’s where the furnace has to go. We abandon that driveway pretty early in the season, and use it as a place to throw all the snow. It’s usually five or six feet deep, and harder than Chinese arithmetic after a subzero week or two.

The furnace would have to go up and over, until we reached this door about halfway down the driveway:

We built a ramp out of planks that stretched from the door to the edge of the driveway before the snows came.

So my family looked out the window, and didn’t like what they saw. It turned into another in a long line of Howyagonnadothatdad, and they turned away from the window and went back to shivering in peace. How, you ask? With a winch and a strap and a 2″ x 6″ board.  That’s all it takes, come on guys, it’s just a matter of going!

So we went to Harbor Fraught, and bought a tow strap:

…and a winch:

…and if you need a picture of a 2×6, I think you’re at the wrong blog. Anyway, the kids didn’t really warm up to the idea yet, because even though we had some experience moving heavy stuff around, we never did it on ice skates before. They thought the ice would make it worse, but they didn’t realize it would make it easier.

So we cut the 2×6 in half. Then we went out in the cold, and used a 2×4 as a lever and a milk crate as a fulcrum, and lifted up one side of the pallet off the ground. We screwed one of the 2×6 boards flat on the bottom of the pallet, and the kid got the picture immediately. We were making a sled. We lifted up the other side and finished the job. The two of us pushed the furnace across the ice over to the end of the driveway pretty easily.

Now comes the part where you have to understand that everything is backwards. You don’t want a tow strap to pull the pallet anywhere. You want a tow strap to keep the pallet from sliding down the hill and eventually into the river. Gravity and a lack of friction will do the work for us if we let it. We had plenty of heavy work to do, though, to flatten the mound at the end of the driveway. We threw the snow further down the driveway to sort of even it out, until we could push the pallet on top of the snow from its spot in the dooryard. Then we got a very nervous Mrs. Cottage, and put her behind the wheel of the van, backed it out into the street, and hooked the tow strap to the pallet on one end and the tow hook under the bumper on the van.

We left a little slack in the strap. My son and I gave the beast a shove, and it started down the steep incline without much fuss. The strap tightened up, and we waved our petite heroine gently forward to slowly ski the pallet down the driveway to the foot of the ramp. We didn’t even break a sweat, which was a shame because it was plenty cold out there.

And now, ladies and germs, I’d sprung my trap. My son had seen that quarter of a ton slide right down where we wanted it, easy peasy, and could be easily gulled into thinking getting it up the ramp into the house would be just as easy. I let him think that, because Satan calls me for advice when he really needs to get stuff done.

I had bolted that cheap hand-cranked winch to the floor in the basement workshop, and I pulled the cable with the hook down to the pallet. I hooked it on, and said, “One of us has to turn the crank, and the other has to walk behind the pallet and push it and steer it. He jumped at the chance at the crank, which was great. I wanted him to choose that option, and didn’t want to force him to do it. You see, a winch works by increasing the weight you can move by gearing your motions down. You turn that crank a lot, and the weight moves a little. He learned that in short order. The boy did his best, and had to, because the crank handle needed more laps around the circuit than the Indianapolis 500. He slept pretty good that night, if I remember correctly.

I never told him that I wanted the job pushing it up the ramp and steering because if the cable snapped (the cable made by the low bidder in a Chinese sweatshop),the man behind the pallet would be killed, and I like him better than I like me.

[To be continued]