Our kitchen woodstove, etc.

This little wood cookstove is the center of our 100+ year old swedish farm house. Wood cookstoves are common in farmhouses here. You can see the little firebox in the 2nd picture - it is about 6" x 6" x 16" - so the firewood required is much smaller than you usually see. We love this little stove! We start it up in the morning to remove the chill from the kitchen (the house is also heated by an electric boiler that heats water for the radiators under all the windows, but we have this turned on only minimally) and it is often going all day. If you set the dampers right, you can go for a max of 4 hours (if you are lucky) before the fire goes out. Usually, you must feed it every hour or so. How you set the dampers and which type of wood you burn determines the temperature of the oven and the cook top, and the rate of wood consumption. We often go for days just using the woodstove for cooking and baking, but using the oven can be tricky and it is smaller, so we may turn on the regular oven to bake larger batches of baked goods. I have only seriously burned bread once, but have undercooked it a few times. As you can see from the 3rd picture, we also hang laundry and towels near the stove to get them to dry more quickly. We have no drier here - don't know of anyone who does. People use front loading washing machines that spin the clothes quite dry, and then hang them up - usually inside. We have run into a few driers in cabins and D has one in his coat room at school. They have all been tall like a fridge with rods inside that articles can be hung from and warm air is then blown through them.

Anyway, back to the stove...it has a massive concrete surround painted white. Part of this is a concrete hood which is beautiful, but not functional at the moment - there is a piece of wood across the opening at the top. Maybe they just opened it when necessary or in the summer. There are also 2 kakelugn - ceramic tile wood stoves in the house (which we were instructed not to use) and it looks like there may have been more originally. We have one in our bedroom which was probably the parlour before we came, and there is one in one of the unheated upstairs bedroom. I'll add pictures later.