Wood & Heat

Sunday morning about 7:30 am, the 10 cord we've been expecting for 3 months finally arrived. We helped to split it at the wife's fathers house. Just been waiting for the dump truck to deliver it. Cost us $140.00 to have it delivered about 50 miles.

Add to that we've been out in our own woods gathering kindling wood. Branches that have broken off from trees over the last year are now stored away with the wood. I believe we ended up with about 7 cords as the estimate we were told was wrong. We put 6 cord in the shed and almost a cord on the back deck for easier access with a tarp over it.

Only took 2 days to stack the wood and we could not have asked for better weather. The last 3 days have been high 50s. That seems real scary somehow when it's November and we live in the snow belt of CNY. Anyway today is back to the 40s and I carried in wood this morning to tide us over for a few days. It's suppose to start raining later today.

My wife wanted me to mention the wood because of the kindling that we gathered. We wanted an easy way to store it and carry it into the house when it's 20 degrees outside. At first we gathered it into 5 gallon buckets but this took up too much space in the shed. We ended up bundling the wood into twelve to fourteen inch bundles with two pieces of rope around it and tying the two pieces together to create a handle. This worked well. The wife thought these bundles would be a good idea for back packers to just tie unto their packs. I guess if you lived in the desert or someplace where there isn't wood readily available that it is a great idea.

Okay about the 7 cords and our heating situation. We heat with propane. We keep the thermostat at 60 degrees. At our last place we didn't even have heat in our bedroom, we used an electric blanket that seemed only luke warm (electric blankets seem to die after about a month for us), so do believe that we will not raise this thermostat. Our last place we heated with kerosene and had to start the kerosene heater everyday for as long as we wanted heat. At this house we have a fireplace and we knew when we bought this we would have to supplement the propane with wood for a cheaper fuel source.

We thought ten cords would be enough and I'm not sure 7 cords will last us but it's what we have and we'll have to do the best we can. This will be our first winter here and we'll see what happens. Next year we may put in a wood stove (her dad has one for us) where the fireplace is but we want to see how this year goes. I'll keep this blog informed.