More Wood for the Winter

August 28th (Friday)

It was cloudy in the morning, but it looked promising that it would remain dry all day.  We ended up having a few showers, but for the most part it was nice.  We headed out to gather some more firewood. 

We went back to the same area that we had gotten wood from the other day and got to work on the second windfall yellow-cedar tree that we had found.  This second tree was up from the road and hanging out over a rocky cave-in bank area.  Jason went up to the tree with the saw and worked his way along, limbing it, and cutting it into rounds.  

At first the tree was perfectly situated so that as he cut the rounds off they would fall and roll down the rocky cliff into the lower area.  And, as he worked his way back along the tree the rounds would fall onto the ground and then with a helping hand he would start them rolling and down they would come.  In between his cuts I worked at fetching the rounds out and bringing them to the roadside and into the truck.  As Jason got further and further back away from the edge I went up to help bring them to our cliff and down they tumbled.  It worked great and was much easier than having to drag them out of the bush and down to the truck.  

We got the whole tree cut up into rounds, and once the truck was filled, we stacked the remaining rounds beside the road, ready for our next load.  We got two very full loads of large, beautiful rounds.  On the second load I even had one round on the floor at my feet since it was either that or leave it behind.  The truck was probably filled a little heavier than it should have been, so we made our way back slowly over the bumps in the road. 

Back at the house we got to work at splitting our now sizeable stack of rounds.  Two of our neighbours offered us the use of their splitting maul, which made it much easier, rather than using our regular axe.  In the afternoon, two of our neighbours decided that they wanted to hang out, and since we were working they figured they would help.  They wheeled over one of their gas-powered wood splitters and split up the smaller pieces that were filled with knots.  It was very helpful and nice of them to want to help us out.  

While Jason worked at splitting up the rounds, I got our lower woodshed ready to receive the wood.  The house is up higher than the front road, but lower than the back alley.  We have an upper woodshed, which is where we were putting the large rounds, and a lower woodshed, which is down at the house level, where we wanted to stack the split pieces.  There is a wood slide beside the woodsheds for getting the wood easily from the upper area to the lower area. 

I set up the woodshed so that the wood would be stacked on top of parallel 2x4s so that the wood would be off of the ground.  I also modified the upper part of the wood slide to make it easier to use.  The upper part is simply a piece of aluminum roofing, which I curled so that the pieces are better directed to the lower part of the slide.  The lower half of the slide is an actual children’s slide; I imagine that some previous owner, at some previous time, took the slide from the old school playground or swimming pool, and repurposed it for a wood slide. 

Once I had the area ready, I worked at getting the wood down to the woodshed and stacked.  It was fun work and great exercise.  It has been a long time since either Jason or I have done that type of work at that scale.  Last year our wood gathering for the boat was quite different.  

It was after 18:00 when we got home, and we were happy, but tired.