If you google "woodstove parts" you will turn up some sources, but my experience is that it can be very difficult to find replacements. You might be able to contact some stove restoration experts who can advise you on substitutes for the original parts. We have a wood-burning parlor stove for the primary heat source in our home and we also need a new grate for it, but haven't been able to find one. In the meantime, the head from a potato fork is just the right size to bridge the missing section of grate and keep the logs from falling through. Sometimes you do what you have to! Annie

With a 1854 house "that needs a complete overhaul", there are a lot of considerations to make before you decide on the decor. Important decisions. Are you going to restore it, renovate it, or do something in between? Or are you really going to remodel it (usually means to gut it & put a new house in an old shell)? Do you know what's original in the house that needs to be saved - you can bet most contractors won't? Dreaming about how it's going to look when it's finished is a good & normal thing, but 150+ year old house is not the same as a new build or a 40 year old fixer upper. Really old houses have their own set of problems that will take a lot of effort to get it to the point of decorating.

I grew up on a dairy farm and that was operated in the same manner as the Amish do today. Grandmother had an 8ft long coal stove in the kitchen and our idea of running water was whenever one of us boys entered the kitchen Grandma would hand us a 5gal pail and say, "Run out to the spring and get me some water." The next boy in the room got handed the coal bucket to fill, and the next boy had to take a couple 5gal buckets of vegetable timmings out to the hog lot and more often than not during the canning season one of the younger boys got detailed to stay at the house and assist Grandma in the kitchen. As a consequence I began learning how to cook when I was about 5 or 6 years old, and I don't regret a minute of that time. Dissassters? Wow, I could write a book about dissassters I have made in the kitchen but one will always stick out in my mind. At about 13yrs old my cousin & I got the silly idea to make some home made rootbeer. (In those days you could buy Hires Rootbeer Syrup in a tube like a huge toothpaste tube in the spice section of any grocery store for about $1). My cousin and I spent about 3 weeks rounding up empty soda bottles & washing them out, all the while saving our allowance money to get the rootbeer syrup. We finally had enough bottles washed out, got the syrup, set up the bottle capper and commenced to mixing our brew in a huge 5gal crock. First you add the water, then the syrup, then sugar and finally a cube of flieshmans yeast, mix it all up and let it set about 24 hours then you bottle it and let it age 14 days to make the fizz. When it was all done my cousin and I each took a bottle from the basment up to the kitchen to get a bottle opener. I snapped the opener on the bottle cap, started to lift it and WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAM, the lid flew off and the rootbeer spurted up out of that bottle so high it hit the ceiling. Talk about a mess...LOL...My cousin tried opening his with exactly the same result. What went wrong we wondered? Then we got to recounting our mixing procedures. It seems that my cousin had not seen me put the yeast in, so without saying a word, he put another cake of yeast in. But as is true of teenagers everywhere, we weren't gonna let a little thing like atomic fizz prevent us from drinking our rootbeer. We just put a dishpan in the sink, then one of us would carefully open the bottle while the other one held a pot upside down over the bottle to catch the spray and let it go into the dishpan, which we then poured in our glasses and enjoyed out rootbeer, even though it did have a rather strong yeasty taste..LOL

I remember my Grandparents very well. Mom's parents died in the early 1980s when I was a teenager. This is Grandma on the left, and Grandpa beside her. The guy in the red plaid is my Dad, and the woman in the pink is Dad's Mom. I loved Mom's parents with all my heart. Grandpa was born in 1904, IIRC, in an isolated village in Pennsylvania that had picked up and moved from Germany in the early 1800s. He still spoke German in the home and at school as a child. Grandma was born in 1906. She was walking across the bridge in a rainstorm one day when Grandpa offered her a ride. They were married something like 2 months later, and were married for just over 50 years when Grandma died. My Dad's parents died in 1996 (Grandpa) and 2004 (Grandma). This is them with my Aunt on the left and my Dad, probably about 1937 or 1938. I LOVE the clothes the men wore back then. My Grandfather was something of an SOB, and my Grandmother could be a real B, too, but I loved them, and I miss them. For all their personality flaws, Grandpa's philandering, and Grandma's nagging, they were married for 65 years.