Preparing for winter…

The sun is shining, the days are long, the heat is wonderful (at least in my view ~smile~) and winter seems to be a far off distant thought. But one thing I know, as surely as the sun rises and sets, winter will be here. The endless days of rain, cold, snow will come. And we will need to keep warm.

We heat with wood. We have a wood furnace that is our only source of heat. It does an amazing job heating our home. It is in the basement with a vent up to the main floor. We keep it going all through the later fall, winter and spring.

In the summer my hubby and sons have the task of bringing in the wood for the year. Our property is covered in trees and every year we’ve lived here we’ve been able to glean the wood needed to keep us warm (we burn about 6 or so cords of wood each year). Normally we find fallen trees (from winter storms), large limbs that need to be cut from other trees, or select trees to take down to make room for other trees that are still growing.

This year we were able to get our wood in from just two trees. Two very big trees! Last winter we realized we had a large dead fir tree that stood right next to our carport and house. If the tree were to fall it would most likely have fallen right on our house. We called in a tree professional as this was too big and dangerous of a job for my hubby to want to take on. He came and pointed out another tree that was ailing and more importantly that tree was also aimed for our house and the larger fir tree would have landed right on it. So it had to come down as well.

This was how my hubby & Jacob (by the time the wood was ready to process my son Isaac was dealing with his ruptured appendix) spent a good part of July; cutting, splitting and processing all the wood from those two trees.

 

The first tree that had to come down..

The mess afterwards

My hubby and sons were very grateful to our neighbor for letting us borrow his wood splitter. Normally my hubby and boys do all the splitting by hand. This was a lot of wood to process all at once but the splitter made the job much easier!

Then it was time for the second tree…

This is my son Isaac standing at the base of the tree…

After the tree fell.. you can see how close it was to the side of our house. Good thing the guy that did this knew what he was doing!!

After the tree was cut and then split (that pile was not all of the wood there was more stacked already)..

 

 

Hubby after cutting down the stump and feeling victorious!  :D

 

And finally we could all rest easy .. the winter wood was in…

I’d say something cute at this point like.. “bring on winter!!!” .. but.. I can’t.. the summer loving part of me would rather skip it.. Ha, ha.. but that is not my reality.