TIMBERRRRR!!

Well done, Rich!

After all the rain delays Rich was finally able to get started the day after Thanksgiving. But even then the weather didn't cooperate, and between the rain and the wind, it took 5 days for this job.




Kudos to Rich's wife and kids, who came along to help on Sunday. Not only did he do great work, but we feel like we've made new friends!

Alex walked the beam:


Arden gave Alexis a boost onto the stump:


Final stats: 39 inches in diameter, 11 feet in circumference, and we couldn't even count the growth rings.


Now it's off to the hay shed where we'll do the log splitting.


There are about 30 slabs of wood like this, plus lots of large branches.






Splitting is easy--just a flick of the finger!



Our first load of split wood.

This is all the wood from the first slab we split, now stacked in the wood shed. Twenty-nine more to go!


So far, we're really glad we decided to keep the wood. We kept going back and forth about it up till the day the trees were cut down. Mark advised us to keep it because it's such a great resource. Rich, on the other hand, was concerned that we might be getting in over our heads trying to deal with all this wood. He said that very often people who keep their wood end up regretting it. And in fairness to him, it is an enormous job. But we have plenty of room to work on it in the hay shed out of the weather, and there's no deadline, so we can use it as filler work and take our time doing it. And, we're enjoying splitting the wood--it's actually lots of fun! But a word to the wise: there's no way we could even attempt to do this without the skid loader. Those logs are heavy!

And here's our pile of hardwood mulch from all the small branches. We'll turn it every few weeks, and it will be ready to use next summer.