so today's experiment went sideways on me. I carefully made my layers of burnables and then stuffed the rest of the space with cardboard like I've seen guys do on youtube. but upon lighting the fire, it smoked a LOT and that smoke escaped out every door seal in the box. now the house stinks to high heaven and I had to open the windows to vent it out. I made the assumption that the box would seal in everything and that's just not the case. so tomorrow morning I'm going to make a small fire purely out of 2x4 splinters and some paper and slowly heat up the box and flue before I add more to the mix. we'll see how that goes. I might have to just bite the bullet and load up a lot of wood the night before so that the box is still warm in the morning. it's a waste of wood because it'll only warm a room that no one is in all night. hampers my ash removal too because, well, everything is hot when I push the ashes around so they fall down to the pan and that kinda sucks. oh well. it's just a matter of finding out what works best for this household. I'll get there.