Stacking Wood

My 2 younger sons just love to stack the wood on the front porch - NOT!!  They've been fighting over who does what.  One likes to take the wood off the hay wagon and dump it onto the porch but not actually stack it because he figures that he can't do it well enough - he's not a details guy, at least not for stacking wood.  The other would rather take his time and stack it just so, thereby driving the first one crazy with his pickiness and each one thinks that the other is doing less work.  To me, their differences seem like a match made in heaven - one empties the wagon first and the other one stacks later.  That way, they're not getting in each other's way, holding each other up and the stacker can be as fussy as he likes.  Besides, fussy stacking is good.  Last year, the stacking wasn't done as well and the pile fell over and then it will roll everywhere.

'Wagon unloader' taking a photo of 'fussy stacker' who seems to be debating where the next piece of wood will fit. 

It helps to have big sister, home from university and full of enthusiasm.  'Miss Enthusiasm' knows that she doesn't have to do this very often since she's seldom home at this time of year.

 I'm surprised at how much wood we've used already this year and it's been a very mild year with very little snow compared to most years.  You can see the new, freshly cut wood going up and over the older wood.  We only cut up fallen trees or cut down dead trees.

Getting Ready For Fall - Storing Wood

The end result of the kids clearing off the front porch in order to make room for...

...lots of wood for winter.  We only have one source of heat in the house, a wood stove in the living room.  Amazingly, it does heat the entire house, top to bottom and back to front. 

There was an old oil furnace in the basement when we moved here 2.5 years ago,  along with 2 old oil tanks.  All 3 were done and had to come out and have not yet been replaced.  We have a 2-year-old used oil furnace and tank bought and waiting to go in but we need to finish digging out the basement dirt floor first.  A lot of drudgery work as each heavy bucket load has to be carried up the old, crooked steps, dumped into the tractor and carted away.

http://huonview.blogspot.ca/2010/09/apple-crates-in-place.html
We tried storing the wood in large apple crates like the ones above and putting the crates in the garage throughout the winter but this did not work out so well.  Too bad, too because the crates were easy enough to move around with the forks on the tractor.  On the days when the sun was shining outside, the ice on the wood inside the crates in the garage never thawed.  If it rained, snowed or was freezing rain outside, the liquid, one way or another found its way into the garage under the garage door in spite of us putting old towels, blankets, etc. under the door.  This liquid would invariably turn to ice, seldom thaw before winter was over and create a slippery floor that we had to walk on several times a day to get wood.

I expected the front porch to be a worse choice but last winter when we tried it as a last resort, it turned out to be much better.  If the weather warmed up, the wood warmed up also and the snow and ice melted.  We only had to go a step or 2 outside the front door and we seldom had any ice where we had to walk.  So we're doing it again this year.  The only possible downside is that most people would not like the look or mess of wood on their front porch but I don't really mind it at all.  It looks like the country to me!