I recently bought a house that has a wood burning stove installed in the basement. Thankfully, I've learned through the last few years living with a two story house that fan placement is critical in distributing heat evenly throughout a structure. It's much easier to push cold air towards a heat source than it is to drive hot air to a cold place. This helps enormously in propagating heat. I have been able to use a single fan to blow the cold upstairs heat down to the basement, which almost equalizes the temperature throughout the house.
Today on Craigslist I found a wood source that should give me a couple cords of green soft wood that I can stack for next year or the year after. There seem to be quite a few free/scroungable sources of this and that on CL. I found bricks that I can use to build a raised bed for raspberries on one side of the house and on another side to raise blueberries.
I figure my daily rate is $250. If I can scrounge $250 worth of stuff, it's worth my time and gas. Less than that, and I'll let it go. Tomorrow should be a $350 day after gas.