Fire-men

Bennington siblings checking recipes on the iPad by the open fire. Sounds like a Christmas song no?

But the big surprise of this picture is the open fire. A WOOD fire in OUR fireplace for the first time ever. Not because we are too lazy to light fires, but because up until a few days ago we had a gas fireplace that was sealed closed and hadn't been used in 5 years.

We sealed it when the cold breezes blowing in became too much to handle in the living room. Then last week Jeremy had someone come and do some repair to the chimney and install a new lock-tight damper. No cool blast of blustery air is coming in here baby!

While he was at it, my handy man husband took it upon himself to convert our fireplace from gas to wood. Why? Because using gas at our house is just too expensive, and it didn't provide much heat. Plus wood just smells so dang good.

The conversion only took like two hours and we are now ablaze! The other nice thing is that the kids are old enough to stay out of it and we don't have to worry about any babies crawling into the fire.

I love love love it! It's so dang warm and toasty in our living room and the smell makes me feel warm and fuzzy. We are getting a load of wood delivered tomorrow because we've already burned through the stack Jeremy chopped up at the farm on Christmas Eve.

Mamaw Creech bought Charley this getup for Christmas. How did she know we would need a fire safety inspector?