It’s not much, but it’s home. And my work hours are highly dependent on the weather and the season. Winters, you won’t see me at all much before ten. Dry summer, I like to work in the morning and evening, hide in shadow in the middle of the day. Monsoon, most days I need to have things buttoned up by four or before, as the sky gives us this day our daily thunderstorm.
Normally I don’t cut firewood in August, because are you kidding? But construction of my new and improved hoop shed coincided with a request from a neighbor to haul off about three trailer-loads of pallets. As it happens, I’m already up to my geriatric ass in pallets and what I really don’t need is yet another pile. So I figure, cut for an hour or two a few times a week, and I’ll reduce the piles while getting a headstart on filling the woodshed.
It’ll never make the pages of Good Housekeeping or even Backwoods Home, but pallet wood works for firewood better than juniper in that it burns one helluva lot cleaner, and like juniper it’s free except for labor. That’s how much stovewood you get from one 4X6 pine pallet, so it takes quite a few.
When I rebuilt the hoop shed I improved it with a better floor, for which several pallets valiantly gave their lives, and half-walls that help with stacking and permitted the wire hoop to be mounted higher. This one’s about seven feet tall at the center, and that’s going to be a load off my aching back as I stack wood in summer and autumn and unstack it over the winter. The older version was literally a pain sometimes.
I’ve got quite a lot of wood stacked up for cutting right now, and I’ve grown quite tired of looking at it. So over the next couple of months I hope to gradually reduce it all to 16″ chunks and store it away. Not trying to bring down a jinx or anything but we really are due for a colder winter than we’ve had for the past three.
We’re due one as well. As hard a winter as we get here, at least, which usually means a couple of ice storms separated by a good thaw. Probably get it, with global warming & all.
Last two we got here in the upper midwest were some of the worst I’ve seen in the last 25 years.
Brutal cold and or tons of snow. Weeks plus in the -double digits.
be happy to have another though 😀
A good winter reminds you why we like spring
Budd – I’m gonna be so mad at you if you’ve jinxed this next TN winter! 😛 I’m in middle-ish TN and this last one was bad enough for me – the one ice storm we did get had us stranded at the top of the ridge for almost a week. Another day or two and I might’ve gotten my wife to try some Spam!