Ahhh, the joys of owning and maintaining an antique cast-iron wood-burning cook stove!  For those of you who have read, and enjoyed, the "Little House on the Prairie" series of books, you may remember the story about Laura and Mary applying stove blacking to their mother's cook stove.  In the story, there was a bit of a disagreement between them and the stove blacking ended up getting on the parlor wall.  But, I digress.  The point of the stove blacking is, that cast iron will get ugly and rusty unless it is cleaned and polished and then covered with stove polish regularly.  The stove polish basically is wax with lots of graphite in it.  That helps to protect the cast iron from moisture to prevent it from rusting.


The previous owners of my stove had just taken some black stove spray paint, like Rust-Oleum, or something like that, and painted over all the rusty spots, rather than cleaning them and polishing them properly.  So, that means that the paint that was applied is now all peeling off again.  That means that I now have to go over the whole thing with a wire brush and clean off all the loose paint, and then go over the stove with the good stuff.  Stove polish.


Stove blacking.


Yup.  It's black.  And it gets on your hands, and it stains the rag you use to polish the stove.  My wife says, don't you dare put that thing in the wash, just throw it away.  I got a spare toothbrush to scrub it on, and then that went in the trash, also.

Applying stove blacking.  You may notice that I have not bothered to change out of my dress shirt.

You can see the rusty spots are being covered up with blacking.  You can also see my hands are being covered in blacking.

This is not an endorsement for the product, but I will say that it does work very well.

Once the blacking has been applied to the whole stove, then you have to go back over it with your dampened rag and polish it to a nice shine.

I would guess that I will need to go back over the stove a few more times in the coming months to pick up some spots that were missed the first time around, but I think I got most of it.  It will still need stove polish once or twice a year anyway, just to keep it looking nice.


One more thing I want to add.  I was home all day Monday for the holiday.  I turned the furnace on to get it warm in the house since I was inside all day, as it was only up to 6 degrees above zero outside.  But, it just never felt warm, even though the thermostat was set at 70 degrees.  So, I got the fire going in the cook stove and after it got hot, the whole house felt warm.  The furnace shut off, because the heat from the stove was enough to keep the house warm.  It was amazing the difference in how the warmth from the stove felt comfortable, even though the temperature in the house was the same.


We also have a nice air tight Heatilator fireplace that works well to heat the house, but it takes a lot of firewood to get it hot, and you can't cook on it.  We have a good supply of old firewood from the previous homeowners.  Some of it has been around for several years and there's not much wood left in the sticks.  The insects have devoured much of it.  I have been working on burning up the firewood that we have, before I start cutting and splitting new stuff.  The small stuff will fit in the stove, but the larger wood will only fit in the fireplace, unless I split it.  Once I use up all the small sticks I will probably get the wood splitter out and split the larger logs so that I can use some of that in the stove.