Wednesday, September 28, 2011

House Number


The house numbers are something I made years ago to go on the old garage that we've managed to hang onto through all the transitions of building the house and taking down the old structure. For a while I thought it'd be fun to have one of those blue enameled french street numbers, but I think I like our home made edition.


You can see the numbers on the gable of garage from four or five years ago. We were extracting honey.

Sunday, September 25, 2011

Fuel




A quarter cord of wood stacked on the porch

Our 2-cord supply near the driveway

All our wood is cut to 12" to fit our wood stove

We've been readying our wood supply the last few weeks in anticipation of heating for the winter.

Amongst the issues we've weighed is where to store the wood. The seemingly easiest solution would be out the garden-end of the house since it's close to the door thats close to the stove, but the issue there is that this part of the house perimeter is heavily impacted by roof snow build-up. In the end we decided to store our wood out near the driveway and plan to load up portions of wood on the porch a few times over the winter.

We had some firewood leftover from the yurt wood supply and last week I cut all these formerly 16" pieces down to 12" so they'll fit into the wood stove with some ease. Since this is also the driest wood we have we stored it for first use on the porch. As it happens, it is almost exactly 1/4 of a cord. We've been joking between us that maybe this is all we'll need for the winter. Its going to be fascinating to see what we actually do use. Our take away from last winter was something like 2-3 pieces of cordwood per day when it was pretty cold in February.

Since we are unsure of how much wood we will actually need, we purchased two cords with the expectation that we'll get through with one cord and have a second cord dried and ready for next year.

Although the cold has yet to really start there was a few days a week or so ago and we noticed lots of chimneys with smoke coming out. With good management of the windows, we've been completely comfortable.