after living with wood fire for heat i can now fully understand how the kitchen table used to be the main social meeting place in houses in the old days and why houses were smaller as a whole. optimizing these things is a complex engineering problem that requires you to design in the infrastructure to enable it from the start.
my conclusion, after much pondering, is a single large coal fired boiler in the basement is the best for temperate climates, and steam resistant piping to route heating steam to all of the rooms, with drains going into the grey water. this is also another good reason to have a small "wetland" area in your small plot farm design, where the warm drain water goes into one spot and then seeps down into a bigger pool where you put some kind of fish and algae and water plants and hopefully it's nice and frogs colonize it as well.
worst case scenario, you have a natural aquatic cleansing process going on and there is always a body of water nearby that never freezes because it's too big. this is another argument in favor of keeping ducks and geese in this kind of climate, as they like the water and make good eggs, meat and insulation feathers, especially geese, who work much better than dogs for alarming the appearance of a fox or wolves in an area.
