Starting to get fired up! A trip up the coast.

There have been exciting developments on the fireplace project. Last week, OH commissioned a second quote on a stove we both liked (manufactured in this country, multifuel, 8kw) from a local dealer who also does the install.

I cried a little at the figures but OH, an inveterate negotiator, promised me he'd haggle. He went back and did indeed manage to get a discount. Woo yay! So the stove is ordered and the deposit paid.

Now we need to

- lay a new hearth
- get a chimney sweep to clean the chimney thoroughly
- clean the brickwork
- replaster and repoint

OH had been bugging me about going for a Saturday drive around the county for a while now, and after I had quickly mown the lawn, I was ready. This was also an excellent opportunity to go scouting for cheap firewood and trying to find an obscure reclamation yard that would have fireplace tiles.

Our first stop took us to a smallholding up the road that we knew was also selling firewood. £140 for a truck load of seasoned hardwood. How many cubic metres go in the trailer? The woman didn't know.

It's this sort of opacity that makes sourcing firewood such a bewildering exercise. I've found a wood usage calculator online and have worked out that we'd have to get in about 5 cubic metres for a year's worth of space heating of the living room and the rooms above. I had been doing some internet research and discovered that round here, £60 per m3 seasoned hardwood logs incl. VAT and delivery to your door was probably the best possible deal.

We didn't buy any firewood just yet and instead took their business card. But we did buy a hefty half-circle beech chopping block off them for £2, and a pound punnet of strawberries for £2.50. Keep money circulating in the local economy!

Our next stop was our favourite seafood hut, a tiny sales outlet near the coast run by an elderly fishmonger couple. You climb up the wooden stairs, you study the blackboard with the menu, you order your tea, which comes in steaming real china mugs, and then you order your baguette. I always go for the Crab Hut special, which costs £4.50 but also comes with a massive pile of the freshest seafood you could imagine: prawns, crayfish, cockles, whelks, mussels, crab. There's far more seafood than baguette. You sit with your seafood and your tea in your car and stare at a wall of mud. Next to you, there will be a retired gentleman in his VW touring van kitchen, drinking tea and playing with his little dog.  It's so quaint you end up buying more seafood for your dinner later.

Then on to what we really wanted: hearth stones. After driving an eternity around beautiful countryside and intriguing industrial estates, we gave in and asked someone for directions because we knew the place would shut at 4pm, and it was well past 3pm already.

We soon found the place, run by a charming, wheeling-dealing version of Juergen Klinsmann, and after over half an hour of us humming and ha-ing and turning over dozens of different-sized and -coloured bricks and tiles, we finally made a decision at 3.55pm and purchased 36 seven-inch original reclaimed square bricks, also known as "pamments", for a cool, and heavily-discounted, £90. Result!

We'll need to clean them and dry them off properly and then work out how we'll lay them but it's another hurdle taken towards our stove, and towards locally-sourced space heating.