Whose idea was this, anyway?

The state of the chata

Good, bad and really messy, this video shows you all three floors and what we hope will be a wonderful new place for us to live - by next weekend.

 

Sporak Diviak – a brief history

Sporak Diviak is how we affectionaly refer to our wood-burning stove. In Slovak, sporak means ‘oven’ and Diviak means ‘wild boar.’ We named our little haven Boar Lodge (Chata Diviak, pronouncing the ‘ch’ as you would in the Yiddish word, L'Chiam) so it was only fitting to name our wood burning stove similarly.

When we acquired Chata Diviak in 2006, there was a fireplace in the living room and a fire pit in the back yard for barbecues: plenty of places to burn wood.

Or so JoEllen thought.

We bought five cubic meters of firewood to burn.

Scott apparently felt we needed more places to burn wood. (Did we mention JoEllen’s mother, bless her departed soul, once worried out loud to JoEllen that she thought Scott might have arsonistic tendancies?)

For the last several years we lived in London, Scott took up the hobby of cooking, to our and our friends’ delight. When we finally decided to retire and move permanently to Chata Diviak, Scott was going to cook up a storm. But he wanted the true A to Zed experience, from making demiglace from scratch, to grinding our own meat and stuffing our own sausages to firing up and cooking on his own homemade hot stove.

We spent the Christmas week before Jo retired at Boar Lodge.  Before going, Scott jumped on the Internet (you know how that is) to research wood burning stoves available in our part of Slovakia.

We settled on this model: not too expensive but getting the job done:

We spoke to our caretaker Ivan to see if he would contact the shop where the stove was sold and hold it in reserve until we got there in December.

Ivan also arranged to have his friend with a van take Scott, Ivan and two more of Ivan’s friends to pick up the stove, bring it back to Boar Lodge and install it on the ground floor just outside of the old kitchen.

All of Ivan’s friends are over 60. Some are well over 60. (Ivan himself is 70.)

Scott accompanied the guys through the mountain pass down into the small town to buy the sporak. But when they arrived they found that the chosen sporak had the stove pipe fitting on the wrong side of the stove. We had a choice: wait two more weeks for the same stove with the correct pipe fitting, or trade up to one already available with the correct pipe fittings.

Scott called Jo. Jo said ‘trade up.’ (She was still on payroll and not yet on a pension). 

Scott paid the shop and the shop owner brought out his forklift to put the sporak into the little blue van that would take the stove and guys back to Boar Lodge.

The van made it fine back into the Štiavnica Mountains, only to fail the last 100 meters.

There was a thick layer of ice on the drive up the hill to our lodge which the blue van could not navigate.

The boys got out the pick axes and shovels (we were thrilled to find we had pick axes!) and slew gravel and salt along the worse part of the road.

After an hour of getting the road navigable, the four old guys manhandled the beast into the dining room.

They had no forklift and no ramp from the van to the ground; or from the outside across the doorway.

A wood burning stove is a sort of ‘portable’ furnace. It is built of a whole lot of concrete to keep the fire in the fire chamber contained. The stove is clad on the outside in heat-transmitting porcelain tile to help radiate heat into the room, a secondary and welcome use for the stove, besides actually cooking on it or baking in it.

That is why it weighs 600 pounds. That's why the shop keeper uses a fork lift.

Neither Scott nor JoEllen even try to lift much more than a 45 pound suitcase or dog (Sisi weighs about 45 pounds). But these four ‘old’ guys made out just fine.

 

Shots of borovicka (Slovak gin) all around as a thank you and there we are.

Ivan’s kamarat, Mejster Vodar (master plumber) Michal came to hook up the stove pipe and get the thing going to put us in business.

For the past two-plus years, we have had the coziest ground floor in the neighborhood. And some of the better cuisine created on top of the stove while it kept us warm.

When we made the decision to build a new kitchen upstairs, the question became, “Do we move the sporak up or do we buy another one?” We agreed to move Sporak Diviak up and buy another, smaller one for the sole purpose to heat the downstairs, there being no other heating source there.

This time around, it takes six strapping young(ish) men to manhandle the stove out the door, up the outdoor stairs and into the new kitchen.

With a wise man to hook it up to its very own, purpose-built, second chimney.

Sporak Diviak is now in its new home sitting next to the (back-up) induction stove and conventional  oven.

Both of us are keen to get it fired up again!

 

Coming down the home stretch

It is now 86 days since we moved out of our Chata Diviak and the first jack hammer started  whacking out the floor to make way for the new set of stairs.

That was April 7. Today we have new stairs.

They’re six weeks late but we have them. And they are like a fine piece of furniture, round-edged and finely polished birch.

The stairs came in a “3-D Puzz”-style set of pieces so it was mostly a matter of assembly.  Each piece of finished wood was numbered, at least each stair was. But it took two guys two-plus days to put it all together and boy it’s solid. What a difference from the rickety old sprial slats we’ve been living with for the past five years.

These new ones are guaranteed for the next five years; and they come with two drawers, one each in the bottom two steps.

The completion of the stairs and now the final grouting on the kitchen tile

has come quickly as have many of the final tasks: assembling the IKEA kitchen

and installation of the new bathroom doors is happening now. 

All that’s left is to 1) move the wood-burning stove upstairs and connect it to the new chimney (weighing in at 600 pounds makes this stove a bear to move);

. . .plumbing  the new toilets, sinks, shower taps, and very importantly: the new dishwasher; completion and installation of the custom copper tiles (three) by local artist Daniel Lichard; and one, final, essential task: cleaning up all the junk in and around the chata.

It’s just a mess, and JoEllen can hardly imagine the thought of the cleaning chore ahead of her. It’s a good thing we have our cleaning lady, Iveta. Scott will also be drafted in to share the load.

We’ve rented the flat in town for one more month in order to give us time to make the transition easier. 

One bit of transition is already complete: Sisi has gone up and down the stairs! That was a major reason we decided to replace the old stairs: so that Sisi could move up and down the entire chata without our having to take her outside or leave her down in the livingroom at bedtime.

Now, when we move home, she can remain the third person in bed.

We are hopeless and we know it.

And we love it.