Getting ready for winter

House wood store

We've been working hard, getting our wood ready for the winter cold. The wood store by the house has been filled with all of the 'odd' pieces you inevitably get when working with wood. This particularly includes the knotty pieces that we now choose to cut short as they are such a pain to split when in longer lengths.

 

Wood shed





The gaps in our wood store for our biomass boiler are slowly filling up. These pieces are generally fatter and at twice as long as those for the house. This has the bonus of allowing us to slice them in half for the house if we run out 'odd' bits.

 



Freshly split, stacked to dry

And here are the logs from the front of the middle picture, now freshly split and stacked. The whole space has been cleaned up and raked, it is amazing how much crud builds up over a year. In a few weeks it should be filled again with another two or three rows. There is enough space here for a lot more but we prefer to stack these with plenty of room in between to allow us to walk through them and for the air to flow easily around.

 

We have been using a wood-burning boiler for a few years now and in that time we have learnt many lessons over handling wood. In the early years we often had odd lengths hanging around that we weren't sure what to do with. Now this rarely happens. If it won't cut into our standard length then we chop it small and chuck it into a holding 'bin' to eventually burn in the house. Because the house wood burner gets more supervision we can get rid of all sorts of strange shaped oddments, the only proviso is that it must be dry!