Well... that was scary.

Last night we didn't get into bed until almost midnight. As usual Mark stocked the wood stove right before we went to bed, he added a little more wood than usual, and we turned up all the heaters just a notch because it was soooo cold.
I had taken my sleeping pills and was pretty much zoned out for the night. Mark was rubbing my back so I was pretty oblivious to everything else.

After you open the stove to put wood in it there is always some smoke in the house, you just get used to it after a while.
But last night it seemed to be a little more smokey than normal.

Drifting off to sleep......

Somewhere from that drug induced state of near sleep I realized I could smell something that wasn't just the normal sweet smell of burning firewood, it had the bitter smell of pine tar burning and we don't burn pine (thank goodness). If you smell pine burning in our house that means a 2 x 4 is on fire and since we have already burned up all the scrap pieces of 2 x 4's left over from building the storage room that meant only one thing... the 2 x 4's in the wall were on fire.

Ok, I'm awake now.

Evidently the build up of tar inside the stove pipe that runs from the back of the stove through the wall to outside had caught on fire and it was so hot the pipe was glowing bright red and the wall itself was starting to smolder. Another few minutes and we would have had a full blown fire inside the wall.

We poured water on the wall and the pipe, had to open up the house to let the smoke and smell out. There was a protective cover around the pipe, Mark took that all off to make sure there was nothing burning inside the wall.

We said a little prayer of thanks and everyone went back to bed, except me. I would have never been able to go back upstairs and sleep so I camped out on the sofa in the room where the wood stove is........just in case.

The wall behind the stove has an ugly, black burn spot on it but I am just very grateful it didn't become something serious.