6 Things We Found Out About Buying Firewood

Hello There, VivBounty here to share with you the six things we found out about buying firewood in our area. As we had enough wood with the purchase of the house to keep us going for 2 winters, we had a few lessons to learn about buying our first order of firewood.

1. The first thing we learned is that you should not wait until you run out because the seasons don't have definite dates, the globe is warming, cold snaps and warm snaps could come at any time during the year. You should order it either in the summer when the ground is dry or after the frost when the ground is frozen. Otherwise the large, heavy vehicles required to traverse great expanses of treed lots get stuck in the muck of the wet land. For this reason we were unable to give our friends the business as their wood was quite far in from a paved road on their acreage and November has been pretty mild and rainy this year.

2. You should order dry wood. We had been hearing that we should buy dry wood which confused us former urban dwellers as we kept seeing log piles out in fields and in front of homes in the country along the rural roads all around us. We wondered how this wood was dry if it was not under cover. Our friends had a basement flood last winter and like many folks in these parts had all their firewood in the basement. Using a dehumidifyer, after some time they eventually were able to burn all the somewhat dry wood in their furnace. We later learned that dry wood meant wood that had been chopped for at least 6 to 9 months and left to sit out in the elements until the tree sap had dried out of it and dry as in not externally moist.

3. There are folks who sell wood in 12-foot logs. Unless your a brawny lumberjack or have the machines, benches and saws to cut these up, you must make sure that you order the wood cut and split.


4. You should make sure the logs are the right size for your fireplace or wood burning stove. The folks who previously owned our home had a larger wood stove than ours which easily burned two-foot logs, whereas ours is smaller and only holds 20" logs. Fortunately most of the wood we bought from him just fitted, some with a bit of prodding with the poker, but we are left with about an 8th of cord of wood which is cut too long and has to be sawed to fit our stove.

5. The delivery truck will tip it over onto your land in a pile, but you will have to stack it up in a neat wall yourself. If you have health issues, you should be sure to enlist help to do this ahead of time or if possible, hire some labourers. At this time of year, there are always some folks who could use some extra cash and you would be helping them.

6. Our time in the rural Canadian Maritimes is relatively short so we did not know that this firewood business is largely done by word of mouth. In the 3 telephone directories we have for our area we could not find a listing for anyone selling firewood. Fortunately, we have made more than a few friends in the village and began asking around albeit a bit too late.

Stay tuned for how the universe conspired to help us find the firewood, and its amazing route to being stacked up the wall in our wood shed in my next article.

Prosperous Blessings,
VivBounty
Country Living