Flicker’s Lair Blog

Back in August (which seems an age ago now) Heidi’s keen eye spotted a “Free Firewood” advertisement on Used Ottawa. Knowing that we were going to be short on wood this year I called.

There were no other takers as yet so I arranged to drop by on the way home, as it was only 10 minutes from our house. I arrived just about 5:45 and spoke to the owner; he showed me where all of the wood was and the various sizes of piles and logs. Just looking around there was a huge amount. I started loading the car as calmly and quickly as possible and drove off home to unload.

At home I was met by Heidi and together we quickly unloaded the haul, then headed back to pick up another 3 loads that night before darkness took hold and halted proceedings. It was a good start but at the rate we could move with our little car it was going to take forever. I was off the following day so first thing in the morning I was on the phone checking the local UHauls for available vehicles, and found a nearby pickup truck – perfect. I started worrying – what if someone else was there or had beaten us to the bigger wood, what if there was more than one! It didn’t matter we had the truck; so let’s go get wood.

Can you believe our luck – not another truck or person in sight! We methodically worked our way through the various stacks of wood. First one truck load, then another and another! We worked out that we would most likely be able to manage one more load in the truck before it needed to go back and that would be all of the wood. Before heading over for a last load we grabbed a carton of our fresh eggs and a jar of Rhubarb Ketchup as a thank you. Having unloaded 4 car loads and 4 truckloads of wood we now had a rather large pile of fire wood.

Transporting the wood to our place was only phase 1. With the chaos that was September the wood was left outside, but come November we really wanted to make sure it was under cover and to some extent cut into manageable sizes. Fortunately we had some assistance from Heidi’s dad who had come down for a quick visit. We sorted through the log pile for anything that looked to be too big for the fireplace and started stacking everything else in the wood shed. Fortunately the weather held and finally around the middle of November we were able to get the rest of our haul cut into fire place friendly lengths, and get it stored.

Whilst the majority of the wood was from this year’s free haul we also have the wood from the tree we felled last year, which also got chopped and stacked. Finally finished we stood back to admire our woodshed.

A lot of the wood in the shed still needs to be split and I’ll be doing that as we work our way though the stacks. We should be in good shape as far as wood goes for the next couple of years and there is still the “dead Ash” near the drive way to be cut down along with at least one other dead tree as well.

Tags: winter preparation, wood cutting

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 at 7:36 pm and is filed under Homesteading. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.