I’ve been heating my home primarily with my freestanding Vermont Castings Dutchwest woodstove since December 1996. 
This high-efficiency, clean-burning, catalytic stove is able to heat our two-story, 1910-vintage home very nicely, although my wife and kids occasionally(!) complain about the temperature in the 2nd-floor bedrooms. I bow to their complaints to the extent that we use our forced-air furnace to heat the house up first thing in the morning, but that’s generally the only time we use the furnace. Over the course of the heating season, we burn about three cords of wood, which covers about 80% of our total heating load.
In recent winters I’ve been doing a fair amount of cooking on the woodstove, too. It’s extremely satisfying to slow-simmer a local chicken, pot of stew or beans, or even pre-heat the pasta water while using no purchased energy.
Heating with wood is not for those seeking ease of use or comfort at the push of a button. As I said, it’s a huge amount of work, especially if you cut and hand-split your own wood, as I do. That being said, I love the whole woodburning cycle: cutting, hauling and splitting the wood; stacking the winter’s dried wood in my woodshed; schlepping armloads of wood into the wood box next to the stove; starting and stoking the fire; emptying the ash pan into the compost pile, in a never-ending cycle. It provides built-in exercise, too, always a good thing for an aging body such as mine.
I always marvel, when admiring a dead tree or a piece of cut firewood, at both the intrinsic beauty of the wood and the amazing energetic path represented: nuclear fusion in the core of the sun emits the solar energy that powers photosynthesis in the leaves of the tree, creating the chemical building blocks that power growth in the tree, including the lignin in the secondary xylem of the trunk and branches of hardwoods, which eventually, when dried, becomes my firewood. I’m literally burning stored sunshine this morning as I type. 
I’ve had many adventures cutting firewood with my friend of many years, Andy Gockel of St. Paul. Our most recent adventure involved taking down a roughly 150-year-old, double-trunk red oak that had died of oak wilt and was threatening the home over which it loomed. The tree yielded a HUGE amount of wood. My share may be almost a year’s worth of primo red oak.
I’m always on the lookout for free dead wood (standing or down). I’m a bit of a wood snob, prizing red oak, sugar maple, and ash above other woods for both their density and their ease of splitting. I rarely look askance at other hardwoods, though, as long as they don’t promise broken splitting maul handles. Give me a shout if you have a dead tree you’d like to see go to a good home!