Wood

As I have previously mentioned I love wood—all kinds of it. I love the look and feel of a neat 2x4, or a 2x10, and I love the look, feel of a freshly-cut white oak log. As I have written, we really, really enjoyed our wood stove all last winter. We went through a LOT of firewood. I have begun cutting for the 20202 winter back in 2019. By my best estimation we have almost 9 cords of wood ready for this winter. Since you may NOT use this term routinely, a cord of wood is a stack that is 4x4x8 feet long.

In preparation for 2021, Andrew and I had cut two big truck loads of hardwood at Moody swamp. I also had 3 truckloads from the side of the street in Northwood Lake, plus 3 more loads in our neighborhood, plus one light load of cured wood from the neighborhood. Finally my neighbor had a bunch of cut wood that he was throwing away, so I got a truck load of that.

You may have noticed that I talk about "cured" wood, and the opposite is "green" wood which isn't cured--obviously. Living trees are full of water. In fact one of the miracles of nature is that trees pump water-which is quite heavy, up 50, 100, even 150 feet vertically without gasoline or electricity! That takes a LOT of energy. But I digress. Because wet wood doesn't burn well, and uses a lot of heat to evaporate the moisture (when then condenses on the inner wall of your chimney), we want to burn dry wood which has cured around 18 months (some a bit quicker, and other even longer). So you must plan ahead to heat with wood. And that requires a lot of wood storage.

So I have 10 storage places for cured wood, and 5 for green wood plus a couple of racks and a pallet and a pile. Most of my storage bins, except for the two big ones, are based on large pallets. Pallets are waste material for many stores, so they are free. most measure close to 4 feet x 4 feet, so if you up 4 feet, you have half a cord. Most of mine have been made of salvaged materials, including even two metal roofs. My latest two bins have double-tarp roofs, fabricated again from discarded nylon tarps.

I know I am not alone in my love for firewood. Just this week I was reading someone else's confession of their love for cutting, and later burning firewood.