Fall Chores

One of our biggest fall chores is chopping, splitting, and stacking wood. We primarily heat our home with a propane fueled furnace, but to save in propane costs, when we are home all day, we instead heat with our wood burning fireplace. It gives us a toasty warm house on those cold winter days. But getting the wood ready for the winter is not a fun chore.

J had already cut down several trees when creating a new pasture last spring. This past week he finished cutting up those trees into small logs. Then he split the wood. J's work schedule has him working every other weekend, so when he had time this week to do those things, we were all busy. Today, when J was sleeping after working all night, the kids and I stacked the wood:



Last year I stacked the wood on my own. Just as I was almost finished, the entire pile fell over on my car! It was terrible. I was lucky that it didn't break any windows, and that it was my old car. Today I knew to move my car out of the garage, just in case. As it turns out, my kids are great wood stackers and we had no issues with that at all. In fact, Emma put me to shame, she was lugging so much wood in each trip. Zack was the one who came up with the great idea to use the wagon to speed up the process.

We'll need more wood in order to make it through the entire winter. But this is a great start. Our biggest concern was that J is having surgery next week, and we wanted to make sure I have enough wood to keep the house toasty warm for him while he recovers. We have plenty for that, and more than half of what we'll need for the entire winter. I'm glad to have this chore mostly completed.