BIG WOODY

I'm sure I could guess what's on the mind of most men right now but for us it's all about WOOD. How big it is, how to make it hot, how to hold it...I dreamt about it last night, actually. Sad, if you think about it. I have a lovely life, a partner I adore and all I can think about is wood. Well, unlike the west coast where a box of Duraflame logs lasted two winters, here we need four cords (not of the plug-in variety) to last us, hopefully, the winter. So, last week a huge dump drunk backed into our driveway and dropped a huge load. Little did this west-coaster know the education I was about to receive on stacking, storing and lighting wood. I'll spare you the ugly details, but here are a few tips if you live in similar climate and are planning on keeping warm by a toasty fire this winter. Because we want to keep the pest population down inside our house as much as possible, we stored the wood outside (key is to keep it AWAY from you home so the pest stay at bay and wood ants, termites, etc. don't even think to jump on your house.) We hit the Home Depot in the dark of night and grabbed several wooden crates from the trash area to elevate the wood off of the wet ground. One of us (I won't mention names but it wasn't me) spent a few hours stacking the wood in perfect formation. We then threw a tarp over the wood to keep it dry (it's best to put stakes in the ground and elevate tarp so condensation won't build under tarp and soil your wood. So, after a few hours of carrying and stacking our wood we reaped the rewards of our hard work by having a lovely, hot fire!

TIME TO COMPLETE TASK: two hours

COST: tarp at Home Depot: $15

STRESS LEVEL: covering our wood with a big tarp: LOW