Here, we saw right away that by the end of April most people already had huge wide orderly walls of next winter's wood sitting in their yards, cords and cords of it, split and stacked and drying. It was a little intimidating to imagine the amount of labour involved in this one housekeeping item. But it was exciting, too. We had wanted to deal with life on a more elementary level. What could be more elementary than providing our own heat from start to finish instead of writing a monthly cheque to the anonymous purveyors of oil or gas or electricity?
As we observed our new environment more closely, we saw that many people kept their wood in an actual extra old house or shed. This is not the sort of thing you notice right away, stacked firewood peering out of the windows of old buildings. Instead it's a telling detail that reveals itself in due time.
The back room of this very house was an attached wood shed before it became a guest room in the 1960s. Keeping the firewood dry and getting to it easily was not a problem for the families that lived in this house before us. But it was for us, at least until now.
Now Greg has finished building our covered wood shed. He used spruce poles for the uprights and recycled local lumber for the rest.
He planned it with a big overhang in front to cut down on the effect of weather that blows in from the southwest, as it mostly does. And also so I will have cover while I'm getting wood off the pile.
This is a huge improvement over our first and second winters, when I tried to keep the woodpile dry with big pieces of heavy plastic sheeting, secured against the wind by random logs and stones. It worked okay, most of the time. But I have a feeling that this is going to be lots better.
Some firewood connoisseurs say it's best to allow the wind to blow through your wood stack so that drying continues all the time. That's the theory we have embraced for now. If it doesn't work we can always restore the guest room to its original purpose.
*I realized that firewood has been a recurring theme, so I made a new label -- firewood -- in case you'd like to read earlier posts on the subject.
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