Excellent day

For starters, warm and sunny with the temperature getting up to an unexpected 18 degrees Celsius. About 14 degrees had been forecast with it rising to 20 degrees by Saturday so today was a nice surprise. I wonder what Saturday now holds in store 🙂

But today of all days my interests were all about heating wood. I didn’t buy any to take me through this winter because quite honestly, I didn’t feel well enough to cart it into the house on a daily basis, let alone have the strength to cut and split the amount of wood that I’d need to ready it for burning. So up to now, I’ve been relying on heating my house with electric convection heaters knowing that I’d incur a big hit on cost but realising that I had very little alternative.

I actually had a small quantity of wood left over from what I purchased the best part of a year ago and now that I’m feeling so much better, I’d been working my way through it for the past couple of weeks during our coldest spell of the winter. And having a roaring fire throwing out heat proved to be a huge advantage, because I was then able to turn one or more electric heaters down, or indeed, off completely.

However, with only enough wood remaining for a few more days, things came to a head at the end of last week. I contacted my friendly wood supplier and asked him if he could supply me with 3 stères of wood, dry and ready to burn straight away and also cut and split down to size so I didn’t have to do it. He said that he’d be delighted to, and today was the day to go and pick it up as I knew that we’d have no rain and that the wood could be unloaded into my store without getting wet.

I had help filling the first trailer-full but not the second and obviously I had to unload both of them myself when I got back home. So it was quite an effort and I was surprised that I managed to do it in a reasonable time without any physical ill effects. The loads included a few large diameter lengths that will need splitting before I can burn them and whereas I put all of the ones in the first load straight into my wood store to be split later, I split the ones in the second load before putting them into store as by then I thought that I had nothing else better to do with my time.

So now my wood store is pretty well stocked again and although it may appear a bit perverse stocking up just as we are approaching the end of the cold weather, I’m sure that there will be a few more cold nights to come after this week-end when it will be handy having a good stock of wood that I can burn without having to think about eking it out. And in any case, it means that there will always be plenty left over for when the cold snaps of next winter start rolling in.