How Much Wood…?

How much wood can an old man stack? Not nearly as much as he could a few years ago, now he has to go slower and take his time. At least this old man isn’t able to do it quickly, as much, or as easily as he could before. Between the splinters when I forget or am too lazy to fetch a pair of gloves or the tightness in my back from bending and lifting, I work for a bit, the take a break. I don’t stack wood when it’s hot and humid. My heart is back in good condition, but doing that kind of manual labor in the heat is just asking for trouble when it’s not necessary.

When I was younger, I stacked my wood pile farther away from my house, then all winter I would struggle to fetch the wood onto my back porch. My wood burner was located in the family room. I would use either a plastic toboggan when the snow was deeper or a wheelbarrow when the ground was frozen and there was limited snow. As the years have passed, I’ve used several other spots in my yard to stack the piles for my fire wood. There were times when I would cut and split the load of logs by myself, but those days are far in the past. One thing I have noticed, each year, I’ve slowly moved the wood stacks closer to my house.

The piles that were farther from my house presented a problem. They were separated from my wood burner by snow drifts. When the snowdrifts were deep, I had to find a way through them or over them while carrying, sledding, or pushing the wood in a wheelbarrow. My wheelbarrow was a rebuilt one with a flat body made from several 2 by 6’s and a metal wheel salvaged from an old deconstructed wheelbarrow. The last placement of my fire wood piles was determined when I moved the wood burner to my basement. I now keep my stacked wood just outside of the garage door. It’s so much closer with usually only one snow drift to either dig through or roll over.

I’m in the process of stacking a dump truck load of precut and split firewood along the side of my driveway and close to that garage door. I found another advantage of stacking my wood burning furnace in my basement, the scraps of bark, splinters, dirt, and wood ashes are kept downstairs in the basement and not upstairs in my house.