New wood – finale

Just to finish off my little saga about the arrival of the new wood, after Wim had dropped by this morning for a cup of coffee while out with Barbouse, I got cracking later on with cutting and splitting the new delivery. The day was perfect for it, being cold, dry and bright, and I started off with the lengths that I’d moved into my wood store, as ultimately I’d really like all of the wood that I have in there to be cut and split ready for burning. After toiling away for something like four hours, here’s how I did.

I was quite pleased with the progress I made and was again surprised by how much cutting and splitting the wood saves on the space needed to store it. Comparing the shot above with the first one in yesterday’s posting, below, the additional wood in the stacks behind the vertical supports consists of the uncut lengths that were in the store, shown in the foreground of yesterday’s pic, plus about the same again!

But anyway, for the time being, as there’s a bit of rain forecast for tomorrow and every day until the end of the week, I’ve now made sure that the wood remaining on the pile outside is well covered and the cover battened down as far as possible.

When the new wood was delivered, apart from its ‘look’, I had no way of knowing whether it would be as ‘good’ (dry and well-seasoned) as what I had before and am currently burning with great success. This is important to me, because as I’ve cut, split and stacked the new wood, I’ve buried the older wood underneath it. So as an experiment, I’ve only used new wood this evening to see how it performs, and here’s a picture I took earlier on.

I won’t know ‘for sure’ until I see how much soot has been deposited on the stove’s glass door and how easy it is to clean. However, on the evidence of the picture, I don’t think I’ve got too much to worry about 😉