It’s late January in Maine, and that means I am spending a lot of quality time with my winter workhorse — the wood stove.
Now, I know she’s not much to look at (and quite dirty, I just cleaned out the ashes and made a mess…) but man, oh man, does she throw heat! Years and years ago, friends of ours bought a house and this wood stove was out in the garage. They didn’t want it and offered it to us, so we loaded it up and took it home. This is the second house we’ve used it in and it heats our first and second floors easily.
Like any wood stove, we do have to perform some maintenance on it every year but it’s definitely worth it. And, then there’s cutting, splitting and stacking wood. Not to mention carrying it into the house, which is an every day event for me in the winter.
This year, we ordered some kiln-dried firewood. It mostly burns well, but there are some too large pieces that we have begun splitting by hand. I just finished splitting some and filling the wood box, actually.
One of Jeff’s super-fun sayings is that wood warms you twice — well, this particular batch has warmed me more than that. I stacked it, we’ve both split it by hand, we carry into the house and burn it.
When we cut our own (when I say we, I mean Jeff — I still don’t do motorized blades), there’s another step or two. We do have a woodsplitter but it doesn’t really like the cold much, so we mostly use it in the summer and fall. Extra steps for cutting our own firewood are, obviously, cutting the trees down and chunking up the wood; splitting, loading it into a truck, then stacking and the rest.
But, there’s nothing like wood heat in the winter with the wind howling outside (which is does often up here on the ridge), so, for us, all of the work is worth it.
Two Rock Ridge Farm 