Lighting a fire in a fire place can be tricky business sometimes, especially if you don’t really know what you are doing.
In our house we have a free standing fire place that holds about 4 to 5 pieces of firewood at a time, this is adequate for heating most of the house during the colder months (Not that it gets too cold on the Brisbane Northside).
Since we have been here I have pretty much been able to get the fire to start first time every time, also on the relight too when there is only hot coals sitting down the bottom of the fireplace from the night or day before, if you use the same process as below to get the fire back up and running again this also works well.
What do you need to start a fire in a fireplace ::
- Kindling, we use dried sticks and branches from our garden’s trees for this, kindling is generally small cut up pieces of the timber you use for burning or in some cases people use a quicker burning timber for kindling.
- Pinecones or some other similar kind of fire starter, I generally use pine cones but you can use kindling only if you want.
- Firewood, a smaller piece at first and also bigger pieces for later after the fire has started.
- Lighter or matches, to start the fire.
4 Steps to Starting a Fire in your Fire Place ::
1. Place the 8 pine cones as per the picture below, so leaving a gap between them, I generally use the latest newspaper delivered for the paper source, scrunch up one page and place in between the pine cones, as you can see I have three pieces in this gap, note also, not wise to use the glossy type of junk mail you get delivered everyday to your mail box in Brisbane, these don’t burn that great and just create a lot more ash in your fire, so best throwing those into the recycle bin.
