Alright, we have to get a 300-pound iron thingie into our house. That’s a given. That’s after we get the 300-pound iron thingie to our house, because the Harrow Stockpile store doesn’t deliver. But after humping the 600-pound wood furnace into the house, we’re unconcerned. Besides, we can kidnap foreigners.

Our neighbor takes in stray foreign exchange students. They want to attend the local high school for some reason. He usually ends up with an unmatched set of Europeans, with the occasional Asiatic or South American mixed in. They have been uniformly pleasant and intelligent. They’re uniformly athletes of one sort or another, too. Hmm. Teenagers who like to lift things. Maybe we can use them for more than ringers on the soccer team, which they most decidedly are.

It’s not practical to have more than four people pick up something like a pellet stove. It’s too compact and vertical to get more hands in there. So with two exchange students, my moody son, and me, I figure we should be able to carry the beast into the house. The weight split four ways is 75 pounds each. If you’re a package deliveryman, you’re expected to lift fifty. If you’re a mason tender until you can explain to your mother why you don’t want to work for her brother anymore, you’re expected to lift at least 100. Believe me, I know. So as long as everyone pulls their weight, we can pull the weight.

First things first, though, You need a place to put it. We built a dance floor in the corner of the dining room:

The cat is doing the merengue pretty well in this picture, I think, but I’ll have to refer to the judges for a ruling.

The platform solves several problems. The floor sags and dips and slopes and twists and generally isn’t flat. The Chinglish instructions for the pellet stove have all sorts of directives about installing the beast (the stove, not the cat), but they neglect to mention that no appliance works very well if it’s not sitting flat on a level surface. We built a platform out of framing lumber and plywood. It’s basically framed like a floor that sits on top of the flooring. The joists taper as the floor slopes up towards the walls. It took some fussy layout but it wasn’t hard to build. We tiled the top with Orange Place we-don’t-want-it-anymore-you-take-it ceramic tile that cost less than the plywood it’s mortared to. Some leftover thin oak boards make a toe kick.

I got the cut sheet for the appliance and measured the exhaust pipe outlet carefully. We bought an all in one package of interlocking double walled pipe that came with a fireproof through-the-wall thimble. It’s a very safe way to vent a wood-burning appliance. The exterior side of the pipe and thimble looks like this:

The little metal flap off to the left is a shield over the cold air intake that feeds the firebox. The makers understand what sort of critters live out in the wild and put a very sturdy screen over the inlet, too. You can twist the cap on the bottom of the vertical pipe and remove it to clean the stack. There’s several of these twist-lock joints in the pipe. You can take it all apart and put it back together fairly readily.

So the pipe is the correct height over the dance floor (we’ll see, it’s theoretical at this point) and the correct distance from the outside wall to line up with the outlet on the stove. Let’s get the thing in the house and see how we did.

First, off to Harrow Stockpile store. I was still driving an Econoline van back then, until the road salt did it in. I convinced (bribed) the clerk that his forklift was just the tool to insert the palletized stove into the back of my truck. It fit with some form of metric sliver of space to spare. If he had sneezed with his hand on the levers I would have had the first Econoline convertible, but he was stalwart, if a little nervous. Andrew Jackson is a fine motivator, but he falters a bit when it comes to bringing calm to a situation.

Then we drove it home. We were going to use the usual walk-it-down-the-ramp method to plop it in the dooryard, and then perform some sort of miracle to shove it up a few stairs and into the house,  but just then my neighbor and his exchange student charges hove into view.

I turned the blarney up to eleven. This will be easy with four of us. You guys look like you work out. We only have to carry it like 25 feet. I continued down the bosh path until they threw up their hands and said No habla ingles, only in German, I think. I went in the house and put four milk crates in front of the platform. That way, we could plop it on there and move it slightly downhill into its final resting place. Then I went back out front with two 2 x 4s to use as outriggers. We were going to make a sedan chair for the pellet-burning version of William Howard Taft.

We slid the lumber through the gaps in the pallet framing, each grabbed a corner, and picked it up. There was a great deal of Danish oomphing and German huffing to mix in with our Anglo-Saxon whining, but we headed off to the front steps, and into the front door.

The kids are athletes. Athletes lift a lot of weights and run around a lot, I gather. Carrying stuff isn’t covered much in gym class. They kept asking me to put it down so they could get a better grip, and I just kept saying “No, keep going.” through gritted teeth. Athlete-scholars can’t be expected to understand things that ditch diggers like me know. Never put it down. We were carrying something heavy at waist level. Our arms were just slings. You can carry a lot of weight like that, much more than we already were. But put it down, and now you have to lift it before you can carry it again. That’s a different ballgame. Keep going. Almost there.

Rasmus and Felix and my son hung in there, and we made it all the way to the milk crates. My neighbor Rich, who looks after them, absolutely forbade me from giving them any money. He explained that part of their exchange program was to do this-and-that chores for the local people they met. It pained me to go against Rich’s wishes, but the Irish uncle gene kicked in and when we shook hands, I did the Andrew Jackson card trick with each of them. I think at least one of the kids spent the whole thing on Twizzlers and ate them all in one go and got a glorious bellyache, an outcome I could only have hoped for, not predicted, because I liked them both a great deal.

So my son and I put a scrap of plywood for a ramp between the pallet and the platform, unbolted the stove, and slid it down into place. We hooked up the exhaust and intake pipes, and wonders never cease, it all lined up. We plugged it in, filled the hopper with pellets, and et voila!

It didn’t work.

[To be continued]