When my oven broke, just as I was getting ready to bake four pies and several breads for our annual harvest dinner, my family’s reaction was curious.

“Hooray!” my 8-year-old son said. “A stove uses too much electricity! Now you can just use the wood stove!”

“Great!” my husband said. “Now we can get rid of that thing and replace it with a gas stove.”

My reaction was a little different. I had just poured pumpkin filling into pie shells, and had no preheated, 425-degree oven to pop them into. And a houseful of guests arriving the next day.

It’s true that we have a 1936 Kalamazoo wood-fired cook stove that we use all through the cold seasons, and it’s true I had just baked a corn pudding in it. But thinking I wanted a little more temperature control for the pies, I had opened that oven door, letting the heat pour into the house, and had attempted to preheat the electric oven. The wood stove, though designed for cooking, doubles all winter as a heat source, and when we’re not using the oven we leave the door open. That way we can cook on the stove top, and still heat the house.

But this was a pie emergency. I checked the Kalamazoo. The room was nice and toasty, but the oven temperature was around 150 degrees and I knew it would take about 45 minutes to heat back up to baking temperature. I envisioned soggy crusts and burned filling but, in the end, it all worked out. Two pumpkin pies, two apple pies, a big blueberry cornbread and a couple of pumpkin breads later, my son said, “See Mom? You don’t need an electric stove.”

I try to keep our utility use as low as I can. Our house is old and small, and we keep the thermostat at around 60 degrees all winter. We try to plug the air leaks as best we can, weather stripping and covering windows at night. We could use a lot more insulation, though. Maybe we’d be better off with the kind of wood stove designed primarily as a heater, but we love the Kalamazoo because of its dual purpose. When it’s going, it acts like a big, cast-iron radiator, but you can also cook soup on the top and a dinner, or pie, in its oven.

Maybe it’s the Kalamazoo that makes my family think we can do without every modern convenience. They think they would be happy living completely off the grid. The kids love power failures, reading by candlelight and warming themselves near the wood stove. A lot of the things most people would miss with no electricity — TV, DVDs, air conditioning, instant messaging — we don’t have anyway. We apparently live at the rutted, gravel end of the information superhighway; our dial-up Internet access is so unreliable that it took me a good 20 minutes one night last week to find out that the third-grade spelling list hadn’t actually been updated on the school’s Web site. So I guess we could live without what little computer capacity we have.

My husband dreams of ice houses, an oxen-fueled methane plant behind the barn, and a sod-covered addition to the back of the house. And I’m fine with all that, too, except for the getting-from-here-to-there part. Because getting off the grid means ripping things out and building them again, and generally investing lots of time and money — always in short supply in the day-to-day running of a family.

The back of our house soaks in the southern sunlight, and installing some big, doubled-glazed windows would bring a lot of passive solar heat inside. A tile or slate floor would keep that heat in. I know that, in the long run, the cost of energy-saving improvements — insulation, better windows, even breaking through walls downstairs to improve heat flow from the wood stove — are paid for in reduced utility bills and reduced pollution.

But when you’re living in a house, and raising a family there, it’s hard to decide to knock out a couple of walls. How do you get started?

Even replacing our electric stove with an energy-efficient gas model would require a lot of changes. We don’t live on a natural gas line, so we’re talking tanks for liquid propane, and a major installation with workmen and fuel bills and everything.

I’m big on reuse and saving old things, thrift store purchases and keeping things running. The refrigerator is half a century old and still works, pretty well. It came with the house. People tell me a newer one would save me energy, but I wonder about the bigger cost. Is buying a new refrigerator — which means causing a new refrigerator to be manufactured and shipped, and an old one to be junked — better for the planet than hanging onto a 1957 Coldspot? Two of my sisters bought new refrigerators in the past 10 years, and both have already had to replace them, one because of a warped door and another because of a blown compressor. And my Coldspot hums on, maybe not quite as efficiently as the four my sisters bought. Or maybe more so, since it’s much smaller than a modern one.

The electric stove is pushing 40, and also came with the house. Over the years that we’ve used it, just about everything on it has broken once, been replaced, and broken again. With the oven gone, it was down to one working burner, and a small one at that. That makes it an extremely large, extremely inefficient hot plate. So maybe it is time for the scrap yard.

The Kalamazoo also belonged to the original owners of the house, and for a long time was the only cook stove they had. I wondered if I could live, at least through the winter, without a modern stove and oven. “Mom,” my daughter said, “I can’t make cookies in the wood stove.” True. But I can. And she hasn’t made us cookies since last summer anyway.

We have a woodlot, and we get enough firewood, just from the dead wood, to use the Kalamazoo every day from October through April or May. The firebox is too small to keep a fire going all night, but I light it as soon as I get up. It takes the chill out of the downstairs before the kids get up, and then I cook breakfast on it. Dinners are the same. If it never got below 20 degrees around here, we wouldn’t ever need to use our oil furnace.

But it does get colder, a lot colder. “If we lived south of Virginia . . .” my husband says. “Let’s move to Florida!” our daughter chimes in.

I’m not sure moving is easier than replacing an oven, or that it would get us off the grid, or even save energy. Not my energy, anyway.

I was thinking of simpler solutions. Maybe I could find a toaster oven for quick melted-cheese sandwiches, or even one of those counter-top ovens that can also roast a chicken. My friend started scouring neighborhoods for appliances being discarded during kitchen renovations. My son said he could make me an oven out of boxes and flashlights. Great, I thought, a Cargo Cult kitchen.

But then, the old oven started working again. I don’t expect it will last forever, but maybe long enough for our daughter to make us cookies. Or for winter to end. Because once it gets warm again, we can start ripping out those back walls, installing new windows and building the sod addition. Maybe we’ll get off the grid yet.

Margaret Hartley is the Gazette’s Sunday and projects editor. Greenpoint makes a weekly appearance in print, on the Sunday Environment page.