Firewood Season

October 9, 2012

It's yet another season here at Heston's--the one in which we process  our firewood for the upcoming winter.  Last year, we received an order of twenty-four cords of maple wood, and that stack has been towering over me each summer day that I would walk by.  When the cold winds of fall began to blow, we knew that it was time to start knocking down the pile. 

This year, Greg also tackled a long-planned project, that of building a wood shed for the lodge.  The shed is within sight of the bread oven, and often during pizza nights, people would ask what he was working on.  It looked like a big wooden platform, and so we said that he was building a dance floor.  While we never got a chance to dance on it, we will soon be foot-stomping in a good way, as we build the stacks of wood, to dry for the cold nights ahead.

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Paul returned from Alaska recently, and he assisted in the roofing of the shed.  We made this video of the job, and my only wish when watching it is that the work would move this quickly all of the time.

Last week, Greg told me that he and Paul were going out to buck a few of tons of wood--that is what it is called when they use chainsaws to cut it into stove-size lengths.  I thought that he was joking.  He told me that it is true---a cord of wood weighs in at approximately 2 tons, depending on how dry it is.  To that end, he made the floor of the shed strong enough to hold the skidsteer, in order to use that machine to move the wood.  I wasn't so sure how welcomming that news was--did I really want to know ahead of time how much weight that I was going to be moving around over the course of the coming weeks?  It might be better to know once it was all done.  It did answer why my back is tired at the end of a day of splitting and stacking.  But will my biceps be any stronger once  I am done?  That's the real question.