Posts Tagged ‘firewood’
Fires Return
Our chimney is fixed! What joy! But I don’t see how Santa is ever going to fit down it now.
It was back in the middle of October when we had our fireplace and chimney inspected, which I wrote about at the time in a post titled, “Important Inspection.”
They discovered evidence of there having been a chimney fire sometime in the past, which resulted in cracking of the original clay tiles lining the chimney.
Never fear, that company just so happens to also install chimney liners, for a (not so) small fee. At least they provide clear photographic evidence of the areas of concern, which our insurance company accepted without hesitation. Our repairs were covered in full, after we pay the (not so small) deductible amount on our policy.
This project benefited from the wonderful luck of the original chimney dimensions being large enough to make it one of the easiest installations possible, according to the guys.
They installed sections of stainless steel tubing inside the old clay tiles from the top of the chimney and didn’t need to break out any of the existing structure to complete the job.
A cement rated for high temperature is also used around the outside of the tube. Everything gets sealed and then checked for leaks. When they finished our installation, one of the guys burned some paper in the fireplace to verify the draft was good, and that was that.
It was instantly available for use. That meant I needed to haul some wood!
Cyndie and I filled the rack on the deck with one fully-stacked row of split logs from the wood shed. I had mixed emotions about the excitement of finally making use of wood that has been drying for a full year, and comical distress over seeing the stores in the wood shed decline at such a rapid rate.
I also found myself surprised over how moving it felt to have a fire in the fireplace once again. It has been almost 2 months since we learned of the problem, and at the time of year when we especially cherish the return of this cozy enhancement.
It refocuses the energy center on our main floor back to the special space that functions as our “living room,” with the couch providing a vantage point that takes in the fireplace centerpiece, as well as the doors and windows on either side providing views of the great outdoors beyond.
It doesn’t hurt that we just so happen to be undergoing a magical transformation into a Christmas wonderland this weekend, as a result of Cyndie’s never-ending visionary efforts.
I think the addition of last night’s fire provided her with just the right spark as a bonus.
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New Incentive
This time of year, when trees and bushes drop their leaves and we can suddenly see things in the woods that were previously obscured by greenery during summer, the number of standing dead trees becomes much more evident.
Last week, just to make the point more dramatically clear, one of them gave in and toppled over before I could get around to cutting it down for firewood.
It is giving me new incentive to get out and prune the forest of these potential threats to the health and well-being of those who may be traversing the path at such an unfortunate time.
Cyndie says she didn’t hear it fall, but noticed the startled horses running away and Delilah’s barking in reaction. I’m particularly happy that she hadn’t been walking the trail at that particular moment…
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Going Right
When things are going right for you, ya just gotta soak it up and enjoy it for all it’s worth. I’ve had a vision in my head since we moved here about how I might manage firewood. After a variety of stumbles in the time since, yesterday I made progress that went as smoothly as I could ever hope, in terms of the vision I had.
When we first arrived on this property, there was firewood stored under the overhang of the barn that the previous owners generously left for us. I had to move it up by the house, but it was more than enough to allow us to enjoy fires through that first winter.
When we had our fence contractor start clearing trees from the water drain path and pulling out old fencing, they created a hefty pile of cut logs that I needed to split to augment the dwindling stockpile that had been left for us. I needed to shop for a splitter. I found that ingenious Swedish manual splitter which works slick and will be perfect, once I am ahead and only splitting a small amount at a time.
The fence crew cut logs haphazardly and I found the lack of uniform length frustrating. It made it difficult to split, but that wood got us through the second year.
I found myself looking forward to eventually being able to cut my own wood so I could enact a little quality control. I figured out the chainsaw I wanted to have and made that purchase, but the quality control would take some time as I gained experience. Meanwhile, I still had a large backlog of already cut wood awaiting splitting, and that kept growing because of the new trees I was cutting down for this year’s fence project.
When the woodshed I had built was knocked down in a storm last spring, I let the wood splitting slip while I figured out how to get the roof back up again. That has left us a little short of ready to burn firewood for this winter. All the splitting that my neighbor recently helped me with is for wood that will be burned next year.
Now with Cyndie home for weeks on end, recuperating from her hip transplant, we’ve been having fires almost every day and have quickly consumed much of the balance of dry wood. I need to take action on a plan to turn the many downed trees in our forest into firewood.
I’m hoping they have been dead long enough that we can burn it as is. I broke off a few small branches and mixed them in our fuel a few days ago with good success. Yesterday, I got out the chainsaw and cut the bigger branches into perfect-sized logs. Some of them getting big enough around that I felt I should take a crack at splitting them.
It’s an oak tree, and the manual splitter was popping them in two with surprising ease. I stacked them in the open space on the right side of the shed and quickly had a pile over two feet high. Everything was working just as I envisioned it could. This is the way I will be able to stay ahead of our needs by just doing a little at a time.
It was an incredibly rewarding exercise, made more so by the hassles I’ve dealt with prior, before finally getting to this point of things going so right.
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New Normal
Wednesday brought a return to normalcy at Wintervale, as Cyndie ventured out in the rental car in the early morning hours and drove herself to work. A form of “getting back on that horse,” if you know what I mean. I don’t know what that was like for her, but her safe departure brought a return to the usual weekday routine for the animals and me at home. Although, it was ‘usual’ under the guise of our new normal which involves WINTERY weather!
The horses appear to have adopted seamlessly, and happily paw the ground in the back pasture to reveal grazing available that still interests them. Regardless, I have begun to increase the daily ration of hay that we put out in the paddock to assure they have access to all the fuel their bodies require to be comfortable in the cold temperatures.
I suppose I should probably increase my daily intake of peanut M&Ms to help my body beat the cold, as well.
I finally made it to the bottom of the pile of split wood that my very generous neighbor helped create, moving it all into the woodshed. Now the stack of logs remaining to be split stands out a little more. I was too busy with other priorities in my race to prepare for the impending snow last weekend, to accept his offer of returning to finish all the splitting.
Much of what’s left is little stuff that will be easy to do by hand, anyway. Not that that would have stopped him. I look forward to using my fancy Swedish Smart Splitter to split a few logs at a time, and working on getting that shed filled to capacity. Everything going in there now is for burning next winter. Right now we’ve got barely half the amount of seasoned wood I’d like to have available for burning this year.
Who knew winter would arrive so early?
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Precious Godsend
A few weeks ago, our neighbor stopped by to deliver some mail that had erroneously been left in their mailbox. He walked around to the back of the house to find Cyndie, and noticed my pile of logs awaiting the ax. He told her that he had a gas-engine splitter that wasn’t getting any use. He offered to come over and help me split firewood.
I had mixed feelings about it. I don’t like the noise the gas engine makes, but it would be a huge advantage for getting a lot of wood split all at one time. I loved that our neighbor wanted to help us, but he is 77-years-old and this was a task that seemed above and beyond the call of duty. Since his first offer, he’d mentioned it a couple of other times when I’d seen him, so I knew the offer was genuine. That made me really want to take him up on it, but I just hadn’t gotten around to it.
Yesterday he made it easy for me. He called and asked if I would be around in the afternoon, because he wanted to bring the splitter over and take care of my wood pile. Happily, I was just on my way home from picking up Delilah from her grooming appointment. How could I refuse?
I’m no longer worried about the effort being too much for him. I think he can out-work me. I wanted to stop when the sun set, but there was still some wood left in the row we were on. He told me I could go and he would finish those last few. I stayed, ultimately insisting he quit when it got too dark to work safely.
Obviously, the powered splitter made much quicker work of the logs than I could accomplish with my manual splitter, but more importantly, it is able to tackle the stringy-est wood that would defy my splitter entirely. I don’t know if it was ash or elm (he said it’s a hybrid of the two), but some of the largest logs were of that wood and I never would have gotten them split without the 22-ton force hydraulic ram-rod he volunteered to bring over.
I think splitting wood is something he sees as a pleasure to do, not a chore. I also think that I live a charmed life to have landed this paradise of a property with two of the most helpful neighbors on either side. As he prepared to depart for home on his 4-wheeler with the splitter hitched to the back, he very matter-of-factly stated that he would come back tomorrow to finish the remainder of the pile that needs splitting.
I didn’t try to refuse. I’m putting that energy into trying to figure out how I will ever be able to return the favor. My gushing thank-you’s don’t feel anywhere near adequate.
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It’s November!
How many times have I written of my astonishment at the arrival of a new month? November is here. This morning there is a beautiful fire in our fireplace and the clocks have been changed back to standard time. The pump has been removed from our little landscape pond and the leaves covering the surface are locked in a layer of ice.
The garden hoses (we had a dozen of them strewn about the place) have all been drained, coiled, and stored. It feels like November. The one family on our country “block” that came trick-or-treating for Halloween last year, showed up again Friday night. Luckily, this year Cyndie had purchased candy, so we treated the one family, and yesterday I tried to eat all the rest.
“Oops, I slipped and another chocolate-almond-coconut concoction flew into my mouth.”
Cyndie recently coerced me to spend some time on a jigsaw puzzle by pitching in to spread out the pieces and flip them all face-up. Puzzling is both soothing and exhilarating for me, and it always evokes pleasant memories of assembling them when I was young. I find that dallying on jigsaw puzzles while listening to well-loved music tends to bring new depth to old songs. The music seems richer and the puzzling becomes doubly so. I finished the puzzle Friday night.
Yesterday, I drove the Grizzly around and collected all the stacks of cut wood that have accumulated from the trees that either fell in the wind, or were cut to clear trails and fence lines. There is no shortage of wood to be split and stacked in the shed. Meanwhile, there are still tree trunks under brush piles that remain to be sawed into fireplace logs, after I chip the branches above them.
Last night I had a dream that involved my needing to plow snow. As shocking as it is to accept that the month has already arrived, it definitely feels like November to me now.
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Will It?
I am stacking the wood in the woodshed differently this time. Will it work? I don’t really know. Basically, I want to be able to have an ongoing system where I can access the oldest, seasoned firewood, while also adding newly split logs. I am going to try stacking the firewood front-to-back, instead of the side-to-side arrangement I used before.
When I stacked wood in the shed the first time, I filled the right side with ‘ready to burn’ wood, while stacking new wood on the left side to dry for the following year. I discovered a problem with that plan after the first winter, when the right side didn’t get used up. I had created three rows of stacked logs, and the oldest wood was at the bottom of the back row.
I wanted to start restocking the right side with new wood, but I couldn’t do that without burying the oldest wood beneath new. I would need to wait until the entire back row was used up before I could begin stacking new logs.
This time, I have stacked the remaining old wood on the right side in a single row from front-to-back. After leaving an open buffer row to allow access to the full depth of the shed, I started a new stack of freshly split logs. I think the trick to making this work will lie in the quality of the job stacking the rows, especially during this initial filling of the shed.
Once it is filled, how much we burn in a season shouldn’t be a hindrance to the job of adding new. Whenever the open space becomes 2-rows wide, I can start building a stack of freshly split logs on the right. There will always be one open access row, and it will move from right to left across the shed. On the right side of that access row will always be the newly split logs, and on the left side will always be the wood that has been drying the longest. (That’s just the opposite of this first setup shown in the image, but trust me, after that old wood on the right is gone, it’ll be the way I described.)
I think it will work. I’m sure hoping it works. I just need to get the shed filled to the brim this first time and then I will get a feel for the viability of my plan. Unfortunately, 95% of the wood in it will be freshly split. As I wrote in a previous post, this winter we may be burning pieces of dead branches I scrounge out of the woods.
If I get the shed filled by the end of this year, we should be sitting pretty for next winter’s fireplace season.
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Standing Again
The woodshed is back standing again, this time with improved bracing and held down by fence wire through anchors buried in the ground. Mike Wilkus was essential and sensational in his assistance in the accomplishment of this feat. I can’t thank him enough. It is almost embarrassing how much this simple structure has come to mean to me.
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I’m happy to report that my idea of using the loader bucket on the tractor to lift the roof into place worked wonderfully. It was not without a few precarious moments, but we avoided disaster and successfully set it in place on the posts. It was interesting for me to see the forces in play as we moved and positioned the roof on the posts. Having the benefit of Mike’s architectural expertise and his practical experience proved to be a priceless asset for my peace of mind as the project proceeded.
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Thank you to Mike, Cyndie, and Barb Wilkus for each participating in the picture-taking which captured this happy occasion. Now my priority quickly shifts to needing to split and stack firewood to fill the shed up again. Before I do that, I need to replace the pallets I use for the floor, which I stole back when I was filling the hay shed with bales. Resources move to the area of greatest need at the time, you know!
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Relative Something 