Warming yer cockles

According to Wikipedia:

Etymology

17th century, Unknown, possibly due to resemblance of cockles to hearts. Alternatively, may be corruption of Latin cochleae in cochleae cordis ‎(“ventricles of heart”),^[1] or of Irish Gaelic origin. Possibly also inspired by mollusks opening when exposed to warmth, notably cooking.

Verb

to warm the cockles of someone's heart

(idiomatic) To provide happiness, to bring a deeply-felt contentment

According to me:

21st century, Finding a way around freezing your arse off in an old Forest stone cottage.

There is nothing to motivate you more to get the stone fireplaces working than being cold to your bones. It makes me cross and crotchety. My knees are like that of a 60 year olds, so when they get cold, warming them up takes ages, makes me stink of deep heat and hurts!

We have three fireplaces, one in the dining room which has a botched burner that needs repairs, but works well, one in the room of doom, which I wasn't going to initially use, but turns out this is easier to fix up than I first thought, the last one in the sitting room, this was lovely, but partially bricked up and the chimney was battered (you may remember this one was the chimney that had no pointing left between the bricks, so the rafters were getting scorched...bloody hell)!! I felt getting these last two up and running would be a hideous job, but the house is cold and my heating bills have the potential to be massive as two of the rooms are over a drafty cellar, so I looked into it.

I picked up a Rosieres enamel burner in France for 50 Euros and Dave picked up an old Broomside Foundry 1922 burner for £80 locally. We didn't really know what we'd do with them, but they looked handy. As always we chatted to Clive about this, he quoted us, we deliberated and decided bugger it, lets save up and get it done. One of the best things about living in the Forest (amongst the billion other great things) is that for £30 a year you can forage as much wood as you like. we don't need to do this just yet as we have loads left from clearing stuff up, but in the future that will be a life saver for skint times!

Last week Clive came over and put the liners down the two chimneys (room of doom & sitting room). Dave drilled the bricks out of the fireplace (knackering himself in the process). We just need to tidy up the fireplaces, get the burners in situ then Clive will hook them up (I hope that's a simple as it sounds - I'll let you know). We also have a hole that needs bricking up in the wall of the room of doom....it's on the list!

I keep getting told this winter will get a lot worse, so fingers crossed we'll get this completed before then and all be toasty and warm. I also love a bit of controlled arson and lets face it, who can resist the primitive beauty of a proper fire keeping you cosy on a cold,dark winter evening?