It's been cold out for a few mornings in a row, so I've built fires in the wood stove.

We alternate between heating the house entirely with wood and heating it mostly with wood. We have access to free wood from the neighboring Starker Forest (one of the many elements of their good-neighbor policy), so wood heat is especially attractive for us.

If cheap cordwood isn't an option, sometimes you can find very inexpensive scrap wood. Nail-free scraps, such as you get from a pallet factory, are better than construction or demolition scraps. We used to get pallet scraps for $60 a cord. These were bone-dry and were really useful if our cordwood wasn't well-aged.

One thing I've learned in my research is that starting fires in wood stoves is a lot easier if you use some cardboard along with the newspaper and kindling. Turns the whole thing from an iffy proposition into a slam-dunk. I learned this from this extension publication. Your tax dollars at work.