When @walkerland Discovers She is Allergic To Woodsmoke.

Living off the grid, homesteading and embracing a simpler life is wonderful, most of the time. Sometimes however you are faced with dilemmas that really are a bit disappointing.

One of the challenges I am facing is having a severe reaction to wood smoke. When you heat exclusively with wood, this is a rather large problem. I noticed the issue when we had a camp-fire outside a while back but figured It was a combination of things and not just the smoke.

This past week we've started burning wood indoors to heat the house. Even with windows open, fans going and no tell-tale smokiness I cannot endure another moment of it. My lungs are on fire, infection is setting in, I am coughing and wheezing, my head aches and not having a lot of fun.

This is quite frustrating and worrisome because not being able to breathe and not being able to relieve the symptoms because the problem is the air itself makes for a bad few days. It is not as though the house if filled with smoke, this is a good stove, we are burning good wood, the chimney is clean - everything that we know of is optimal.

I just adore sitting in front of a warm fire in the evening so it is disappointing on so many levels. I also like to heat water, cook, warm things ... I am really missing the warmth of it's flames already.

We are fortunate that we have a back up - we also have an outdoor wood furnace to heat the cabin with. This was part of the original design of the cabin. We invested in this wood stove so that during the shoulder months we would be able to take the edge off the cold without having to load up that big furnace. It uses more wood and we don't need 24x7 heat. Sometimes just a few hours of heat and the house is warm enough for the whole day. This furnace takes hours to warm up so you really might as well keep it running.

I suppose knowing we have this indoor stove for emergencies is reassuring but at the same time, we could have invested in so many other things had we known it was going to be a problem.

I've been around fireplaces for years and not had this problem so it does make me wonder if it's the design of the house or something that I am overlooking.

I don't even know what the point of this post is other than to share that sometimes things don't happen as planned, things change or we learn from experience that we can't do certain things that we wanted to, on the homestead. Having been an avid camper and spending so much time around fires, I never even imagined that wood smoke and a fireplace would be a problem, but it is. My health comes first, so we'll have to figure something out and adapt.