I did a light refurb on an old woodstove this past autumn. The stove, in fact, is now situated in my living room, though is not yet hooked up, as we’ll need to line the chimney first which is likely to be a fairly expensive undertaking.
This stove is an Danish contraption from the 1970s, based on a style of woodburning stove that the Scandanavians have been using since the Age Of Reason. There is a small firebox with one or more arched chambers above it to extract the maximum amount of heat from the smoke before sending it up the chimney. Therefore you get more heat efficiency out of a smaller amount of fuel.
My parents used this stove in their living room from the early ’90s until maybe 2000. At which point, they replaced the big Warm Morning barrel stove in the basement and the Skov Ovn with a small forced-air gas furnace. The Skov sat out on their back step for a couple of years until I wheedled it, then it sat on my back step for a couple of years until I started feeling guilty about it looking like this:
Therefore, I bought a couple of tubes of stove-and-fireplace caulk and a bottle of stove blacking and set about restoring it to a somewhat respectable state.
I will let you be the judge as to whether I made a success of the job with the following before-and-after shots:
I’ve always been particularly fond of the reindeer-pulled chariot and its impressively-busted, toga-wearing driver. As best I can determine, she’s meant to be Diana, who is sometimes depicted as driving a chariot pulled by deer and wielding a bow-and-arrow.
Here she is, crusty:
And here’s how nicely she cleans up:
In order to cure the caulk, I had to build a fire in it and then damper it down and basically let the caulk slow-roast itself. The little stove is now beautifully sealed – it used to always smoke a little around the Skov Ovn badge on the heat-extractor chamber, but now, the only place smoke comes out is through the stovepipe hole.
I’m sure it’s not up to any kind of professional standards, but for our household, in which Martha Stewart does not live, it looks like an acceptable job.
Ooh! Aaah! a thing of beauty and what gratifying results for your labors.
Thank you! I did spend many hours with steel wool, scrubbing off that velvety coating of surface rust. The old Skov Ovn cleaned up pretty nicely for all that. It’s just such an odd little thing, and I am thoroughly pleased with how it looks in the house.