How to clean a wood burning stove window

You're probably wondering why in the world some Texans have a wood burning stove in their house. Well, we have two good reasons:

1) We are super cheap and don't like our heater to run.
2) We are super cold because we don't like our heater to run.

So for those three bitterly cold weeks in Texas (you know, 30 to 40 degrees), we keep that wood burning stove rocking. Last week I dragged the comfy leather chair over in front of the blower and studied my personal training test materials all day long. If I were any closer to that fire I'd have been sitting in it.

The first year we had the stove I tried to use Windex to clean the stubborn soot off the window. Then I'd give up when my arm felt like falling off.

Then I saw a blurb in The Farmer's Almanac that said you could clean soot by wetting a towel, dipping it in ash, and rubbing the soot off. Y'all, much like how the hot vinegar and Dawn miraculously dissolves shower scum, ash makes cleaning the stove window an absolute snap. No elbow grease required!

Take a look:

Dirty, sooty window. Can't see the pretty fire!

Take a wet rag and dip it in ashes.
(This rag has been used for this purpose a few times, obviously.)

Scrub gently.

After the soot is gone, wipe window clean with clean wet towel.

The fact that you don't have to buy some fancy cleaning product to get that window clean as a whistle delights me to no end every time! I imagine this would work for any stubborn window stain, although cleaning with ash is pretty messy. But in this case it's totally worth it.

Random aside:

See that neat looking iron kettle back there? It's new. And unfortunately useless.

When you run a wood burning stove in your house it dries the air out something awful, and we usually keep a little pot of water on it to humidify the air. At Tractor Supply we saw that kettle and thought, "Hey! That would be cool to use on the stove instead of our tacky little pot." But what didn't cross our mind is that, "Hey! If you leave water in an iron kettle for more than 10 minutes an inch of rust will form on it!" Those things aren't really meant to be left on the stove all day. So now we have a really cool looking useless iron kettle. At least it was only eleven bucks!

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Workout of the Day

Combat 45 and Les Mills Pump Core

It's been about a month since we started this program, and I still look forward to it every day. My kicks are getting stronger, and I still laugh at Dan's crazy comments.