The fallen trees are going away

After mowing around them for two years, and adding a few more to mow around after high winds hit last summer again, the trees across the farm road up to my cabin are finally going away. With a week or two of seriously cold weather, the ground is fairly well frozen, and the farm road is can be navigated by something other than a tractor or ATV. This is good, as "seriously cold" also means "high heating costs" and I need more wood.

I previously got my wood (excellent stuff!) from a friend who used to be able to back right up to my door with his truck and dump it near my woodpile. He recently invested in a trailer and prefers to bring multiple cords. This means A) I have to pay for 2-3 cords when I might not have the money, and 2) I have to haul the wood up from the driveway myself. I did that just once, and never again. Now that I have the dumpster in the driveway, the garbage truck needs to back in as well, so there can't be a pile of wood in the way.

So this fall has been the dance of the Craigslist Wood Guys. Luckily, as the winter rolls on, there are more guys who are willing to stack the wood for just a mere $20 extra. When I was younger, and also had more time, I would have saved that $20 and stacked it myself. But nowadays, with so few hours in the day left to me, I'm happy to have two guys toss it off the back of the truck and have it all done in a half hour.

The first guy who brought me wood delivered it after three days of pouring rain and stated that it should dry outside in 5 days, and inside in 2. Well, it still isn't really dry five weeks later, and I had to purchase WoodBlockFuel to get things going and keep things going, in my small stove. I asked him for an estimate on my roof, which I still haven't received, so I assumed he was too busy and had moved onto other things.

The second guy came this weekend and delivered a 3/4 load of excellent wood, and stacked it nicely. He's supposed to bring the rest of the cord this long weekend (his truck doesn't hold a whole cord). Let hope he shows up as planned. If he does, I'll be happy to have myself another good wood guy.

The morning after Wood Guy #2 delivered wood, the phone rang. He had asked me if "early" was OK to deliver the rest of the wood, so I wasn't surprised at the message asking for permission to come cut downed wood on my property--an offer I had made to both guys (plus a neighbor) as long as the trees across the farm road disappeared. Well, the message was actually from Wood Guy #1 (hey, don't rely on me for good voice recognition on the phone--I can barely remember people by face!) and he showed up yesterday afternoon and started making good progress on the downed trees. Of course today the temperatures have warmed up, so it will be too wet to make it up the hill again this weekend (sigh). But at least half of it is gone.

I'm thinking about investing in a small chain saw to take care of the little stuff that these guys will likely leave behind. They want to load up short sections of logs to take back to their woodsplitter, not fill up their truck with brush and tops, I'm sure. Whereas my little stove would be quite happy with the three-inch branches they are leaving behind. Chances are I won't cut off a foot cutting up such small stuff (she says).

Molly and I went for a walk up on the hill to check their progress after they drove off with the first load of logs, and I was surprised to see them get that much wood out of just a few medium sized trees. There are still some left to cut up and move, but things look much better than they did before.

There are still some left to go.

I haven't been up the hill in awhile because seeing all those impassible trees just made me depressed at my own inabilities. When I got to the top of the fields I discovered Mother Nature had been playing ball with my old lawn furniture I have perched up there as a resting spot on my summer walks.

I dug them out and set them up again.

The old bonfire wood also needs to go away, because it depresses me as well. Friends used to come over faithfully on a mid-September weekend for a birthday bonfire for myself and another woman in the group, but that no longer happens since my husband walked. The wood has been sitting so long, there have to be huge families of mice living under there now, and I don't want to send them up in a blaze of glory, so I'll likely just pull it apart and toss it off to the side, then dig a fire pit like I have at the house to burn it up piece-meal.

I'd be happier with a fire pit anyway, since the bonfire always made me nervous when things were dry. It's not like fire trucks can get up here easily. I'll probably also dig one up at the cabin, with wire grates for all of them to keep big chunks of sparks from wafting off into the trees. Up at the cabin there is dead stuff all around and very dry and dead standing trees.

Just for the fun of it, I took photographs of the designs on the backs of the wood chairs a friend made, down by the house. It's time to take them indoors to dry out and sand and refinish again, before they fall apart any more than they have.

It was such a good day that I actually finally got out my drawing things and began to work on a promised cat portrait.

And that was Saturday! Let's hope the rest of the long weekend continues to be as productive.

Poor neglected blog and home improvements

Yikes, almost a whole month since my last post?

Work has been busy. Busy in a good way. I'm headed into a three day weekend and I'm thrilled.

I've been doing some work on the house...ripping up old carpet, etc. and once the sun is shining the right way again, I'll take some more photos, but my bedroom upstairs (which I seldom sleep in, since I like to crash downstairs in the winter) now looks like this:

I ripped up the old carpet after peeking under a corner and seeing unpainted hemlock boards. Perhaps I could sand and finish them? Well, after I began ripping up the carpet I discovered they had been partially painted, and...oopsie....the "floorboards" were actually the ceiling boards of the den below.

...and you could see right downstairs. So I went at the floorboards with pale green paint and caulk....

It's still a major improvement over 20 year old brown industrial carpet, which looked good when we moved in, but had experienced some serious wear and tear both before and after our arrival.

Here is the other half of the room:

The table and chairs I picked up alongside the road from a "free" pile at a neighbors.

This entire room was redone to accommodate the rug I purchased off of Amazon.com. The ferny one. I might have had too much wine when I purchased it, but I'm glad I did. I received a gift card via work. I could not spend it on bills, so I targeted the house. While surfing around, I found the ferny rug, and somehow ended up buying it, expecting it not to arrive for weeks. In two days, it was on my doorstep. Well, I assumed, it would take weeks for the wrinkles to fall out. Nope, it laid flat as soon as I unrolled it, and I had a friend due to come and stay two days later. That meant making the room accommodate the new rug, which meant ripping up the old one.

Then the friend couldn't make it. Oh well...it was great incentive to rip up old stinky carpet and paint and caulk floors!

The cat in the photo is Tommy, with his permanently runny eyes, and thick fur that makes him look tubby (he's only seven pounds although he looks about fifteen).

One nice thing about the gap in the floor is that the heat from the woodstove make the bedroom the second warmest room in the house. Also, when I play music downstairs, I can hear it upstairs. If new owners in the future don't like those options, they can just lay down a hardwood floor, or put down a pad and carpet again.

I'm not sure my taste matches the rest of the world, but personally, I love it. :)