Who is cutting wood?

[bushman]

I am. This is a major part of my conditioning program, and it saves thousand of dollars per year that I can blow on skiing.

[Meadow Skipper]

^That's quite a pile o' wood.

I've been busy too. This is me in an iPhone self-portrait with some of my home stash:


That's what I cut for the shack at work. That splitter rocks balls:

[~mikey b]

shed is filled with tamarack for next 2 winters + tarped stacks of oak, tamarack and cedar for now

first burn a couple night ago

[Jer]

Nice. I still gotta cut like 5x that amount before too much snow.

[~mikey b]

I cut and split 6 cords last month. You're going to do 30? Right......

[Dantheman]

saves thousand of dollars per year that I can blow on skiing

Man it's nice to live in an area with cheap natural gas. A year of gas bills for me, including hot water, adds up to maybe $500. We had wood heat growing up in the sticks, I have a lot of fond memories of hauling and splitting wood. Still pretty handy with a maul.

[~mikey b]

^That's quite a pile o' wood.

I've been busy too. This is me in an iPhone self-portrait with some of my home stash:


That's what I cut for the shack at work. That splitter rocks balls:

that's a sweet shack

nice wood

[Sparky]

^^ Ace saw too, rockin the husqvarna

Sweet set-up allround

[buttahflake]

soft wood?
no thanks.
give me ash and maple, please.

[Buster Highmen]

This past late summer into fall, I built a decent woodshed with my kids. A good project, lots of tools for the boy. Now no more fumbling with wet tarps in the rain digging around trying to get some wood.

Last spring, my wife had contacted a tree maintanence company that dumped 4+ cords of douglas fir and sitka spruce on us. And dumped is the operative word. Lots of the rounds were 3-4' in diameter and up to 3 feet long, way too big for me to easily move.

So the earlier part of the summer's "spare" time was burned up moving these enormous rounds to a better spot. This involved our little 92 toyota truck and lotrs of ingenuitity on building paths on a 6' tall woodpile for rolling and powerbarring rounds I could nowhere near lift. Some I just had to split with a wedge on the spot. Some of the super meggas I rolled off to the side and will have to spend a day with my itty bitty 18" bar chainsaw cutting up.

Spent a bunch of time in the last month in between soccer games, dance lessons and work splitting rounds, also a bunch of it with the kids. The wedge work is slow going for a 9 year old 60 pound girl or and 11 year old 90 pound boy. But now we're up to a decent cord and a half of really nice dry hot burning long lasting wood. It's not oak or cherry, 2 trees we don't see a lot of although there's some wild cherry I got a hold of a few years ago that was amazing, but the fir and sitka burn really well.

All hand split. The inlaws have a splitter, but ti would have to be dragged over here over 5 miles and it comes with the father in law. So I'll be hand splitting more. But those power splitters are the bees knees.

I've still got two huDge files of unsplit wood all tarped up for the winter at which I'm chipping away. Pics are too much organizational height.

[bushman]

soft wood?
no thanks.
give me ash and maple, please.

Birch is not soft wood, ash is what I've burned the last 15 years but I'm getting old/lazy so this year I bought 11 cord. Going into the forest cutting, skidding by hand, hauling, sawing, splitting and stacking just did'nt seem like fun this year, so I bought birch and had it delivered.
I split all my wood with a ax. Want ta arm wrestle?

[buttahflake]

i buy kiln dried, bark off.
stack it once, burn it hot.
the more you touch the wood, the less cost effective it is.

[Mr. Multiglisse]

i buy kiln dried, bark off.
stack it once, burn it hot.
the more you touch the wood, the less cost effective it is.

Ain't that the truth. Can't believe people are burning sitka spruce, seems like blashphemy for a wood that should be used to build airplanes or kayaks. Of course, westerners probably can't believe that I'm burning maple, which should be used to make fine furniture. Breaks my heart to throw a piece of bird's eye maple into the firebox.

Buttahflake, just curious what do you pay for kiln-dried firewood? It has to be expensive. I buy local winter-cut maple for $85 / face cord, split and delivered. I split some pieces again so they burn better. Six cords plus a tree or two I cut myself gets us through the Hinterlandian winter.

Bushman, that is a fuck-load of wood. Do you burn all that in one winter?

[refried]

I'll burn about 6 cords a winter, all hand split.
The worst thing about burning wood is the yellowjackets. I can keep about 1/3 of a cord in the house and every week and a half or so I'll bring a load of wood inside. after a day of being inside the yellowjackets that have been hibernating in the wood begin to wake up and fly around or they'll bite you when you grab a piece of wood to put in the stove. They also have a habit of falling from the posts and beam ceiling at night, lots of fun.

[AK47bp]

I contract out my wood cutting to a local outfit, Safeway. They do a bang up job and I can parlay it into $.001 off my next gallon of gas.

[buttahflake]

kiln dried is expensive.
$285 delivered.
no bark, no bugs, no hiss, just high quality BTU's.

[Meadow Skipper]

that's a sweet shack

Isn't it? We built that three summers ago with logs salvaged from a fire. It's the upper mountain top watch - replaced a total dump:

soft wood?
no thanks.
give me ash and maple, please.

Yeah, if you live in the east. Good luck finding hardwoods in New Mexico, especially at 12,000 ft where that cabin is. All we got up there is spruce. The wood in my first picture is piñón and juniper, which is the preferred shit around northern NM. I get a green wood permit every year for a nearby mesa.

Fuck of a lot of work there, Buster, innit? But the family that busts ass together...

[Grange]

Birch is not soft wood, ash is what I've burned the last 15 years but I'm getting old/lazy so this year I bought 11 cord. Going into the forest cutting, skidding by hand, hauling, sawing, splitting and stacking just did'nt seem like fun this year, so I bought birch and had it delivered.
I split all my wood with a ax. Want ta arm wrestle?

I rarely use birch for firewood because it is a pain to split when dry. It seems to break apart rather than split cleanly and it burns quick with a lot of ash like aspen. Maple (specifically hard maple) is one of my favorite wood to use for firewood. It burns hot much like beech.

I probably around 3 cords a season for my house and cottage. I don't mind going out into the national forest to find, and cut wood and then bring it home to split. Yes it does take away time from bird hunting with my dogs, but cutting a load of wood is a better workout (especially shoulders) than going to the gym. I burn wood just about every night from November to April.

[Grange]

kiln dried is expensive.
$285 delivered.
no bark, no bugs, no hiss, just high quality BTU's.

Find the right fire wood you won't have to deal with the bark or the hiss.

[refried]

kiln dried is expensive.
$285 delivered.
no bark, no bugs, no hiss, just high quality BTU's.

That's not bad, around here I've seen split cords of fir selling for $225 - $250 a cord delivered, but everything is more expensive here.

Has anyone tried the manufactured pressed logs? not duraflame, but the logs made from real wood chips and pressed into an 8 pound log, I bought about 30 of them a few years ago to try and was very impressed, they burnt for 6+ hours each, had lots of heat and very little ash. The biggest advantage was that they were clean, no wood chips around the stove.

[Buster Highmen]

Isn't it?

Yeah, nice job on the even notching.

Fuck of a lot of work there, Buster, innit? But the family that busts ass together...

Man my old back aches some of those days and it brings focus to the time. For some reason today I'm all soaked through with "Time In A Bottle", "Cat and the Cradle" and "Mr. Bojangles" kind of stuff. All that work is time really well spent in so many ways. Been really trying to think about how my time is allocated.

We sold our big house a while ago and moved into a 2k sqft place for the 4 of us. It's tight living on top of one another but tis also a great thing doing the full contact parenting thing. This place has a little living room with a 16 foot ceiling and a woodstove stack running up it, so we can heat it pretty well on 3 cords a winter; long damp, winters that last into June not too cold but consistent.

[sanjuanworm]

locust with some oak mixed in..........

[RootSkier]

This makes me sad. Worst part about this town -- can't add a wood burning device to a house.

[Meadow Skipper]

Man my old back aches some of those days and it brings focus to the time. For some reason today I'm all soaked through with "Time In A Bottle", "Cat and the Cradle" and "Mr. Bojangles" kind of stuff. All that work is time really well spent in so many ways. Been really trying to think about how my time is allocated.

Ha. I got all that way after hearing "Old Friends" by Simon & Garfunkle a couple of weeks ago. I went into a bit of a funk.

We sold our big house a while ago and moved into a 2k sqft place for the 4 of us. It's tight living on top of one another but tis also a great thing doing the full contact parenting thing. This place has a little living room with a 16 foot ceiling and a woodstove stack running up it, so we can heat it pretty well on 3 cords a winter; long damp, winters that last into June not too cold but consistent.

There's nothing like a wood stove for fighting that northwest damp weather.

[Flyoverland Captive]

I've got 4 cords of tamarack and red fir split and stacked; 1 more to split then I'm done. Love the workout, but the constant bending down is torture on my old carcass.

Around the Spokane area, tam/fir goes for about $200/cord. I have an excellent wood guy; he's got 100 acres filled with dead standing trees. No punk, no rot, no ants or bees- bone dry: good stuff.