Getting In Wood

If anyone ever figured the number of times one single piece of wood is handled before it is burned, there might be the possibility that no one in their right mind would use wood as a heating fuel.

While getting in wood today, I thought about the whole process and documented it. We use wood to heat in the garage and also in the house. So that means we need a supply of wood in these two spots to fuel those two stoves.

We've got the bigger of our two wood sheds full of maple or hard wood. This is the wood we use in the coldest weather and/or for overnight fires because it burns slowly and gives off more heat than soft woods . . .

. . . which is what we have in the front part of the smaller of the sheds. (Zoey the Wonder dog has to check to see if any chipmunks or squirrels have taken up residence in the stacked wood.)

Even though we've had a very snowy winter, we haven't had any sustained periods of really frigid weather so we've got lots of wood left as we approach the last couple of months of our wood heating season. Good news, and we're mighty thankful for it!

To fill the wood rack for the garage stove, we fill a wheelbarrow in the wood shed and bring it to the people door of the garage. It's easiest to roll the garage stove wood rack right to the door where the wheelbarrow is and fill it from there.

When the rack is full, it gets wheeled through the unheated part of the garage to its spot near the wood stove in the smaller heated part of the garage. There. That's taken care of.

We have a wood box on our enclosed back porch where we store the wood we use inside the house. So another wheelbarrow full (or two most of the time) of wood gets parked by the door to the porch . . .

. . . and the wood is hand carried from wheelbarrow to the wood box on the porch.

We have a rack that we keep full of wood in the house right inside the door leading to the enclosed porch so it's handy to fill this rack from the wood box on the porch.

How often do we have to bring wood into the garage and house? Depends totally on how cold the outside temperature is. In the very coldest of weather, the garage rack needs to be filled every other day. Because the wood box on the porch holds more wood, it's less frequently for that supply.

Of course, getting the wood into the house and garage is only one part of the operation. How many times is a single piece of wood handled as it goes from a pile of 8' long logs to being stacked in the wood shed? Many, many times, trust me. Sometimes I feel I know each and every piece of wood intimately because I've handled it so often.