At Long Last

Are those amazing woodpiles, or what? I've never seen anything like that.

I finally finished this year's wood pile, and I think I'm ahead of schedule in terms of years past. I'm still a bit blown away by how much wood we use, but such is life in the wilds of New England. A lot of people I talk to said they ran out of wood or used an excessive amount of heating oil/propane last winter, and it was a long one. We used up our year's supply and dipped into year two, probably using about 15% of it, which was a bummer because not only does it mean more work over the summer, but I had only split and stacked about 1/2 the year, so it really looked depleted. Bringing it back to completion required that much more work this spring, so I was on a mission. Another thing I did wrong was splitting some old and huge logs into really big pieces. I knew they would fit because our stove is pretty big, but they stack into inefficient piles that we burn through quickly.

I can't really get too complacent, however, because that's what did me in last year. With this year done, I can casually but diligently start working on year two. It's great because there is still a fair amount of wood left over, so I can toil away at that until we get our next delivery. As I've mentioned before, if we could finish year two with what we've got, then we're in hog heaven, but we won't really know until we stack that last piece. Here's to hoping.

Until then, thanks for reading, and thanks to Suzanne for the pic.