Clearing out and Firewood

Everything was blocked into 16-18" firewood blocks for later splitting.  The brush was all left behind to be burned.  The first thing I needed was a way to haul the wood out.  The plan was to stage it to my friend Brook's house where he had room to deal with it, and get it split.  I had the truck already, but to maximize hauling ability, I added some sides to it.

You could haul an awful lot of wood this way.  ...More than the truck was rated for, if you went too far.  Here is about 4100 lbs of oak ready for unloading at Brook's.  That was quite a heavy load.

After hauling for months and splitting it all up, we were into the next year.  This next pic is the entire oak firewood pile generated and split/stacked ready to sell.  17 face cords worth of 100% oak.

During the time I was hauling all of the wood out, I ran across a turkey nest in the weeds, while doing some brush cutting.  I left it alone and later on the eggs mostly hatched.

We had a number of very large brush piles that we needed to burn.  Most of these were the size of a school bus or bigger.  I'd guess we've burned 6 or 7 large piles to date.  Here is one of the early one in the early stages of going up.

Of course, the big question is how do you make such a large brush pile.  That first spring (2010) I realized I needed equipment to make this happen, so I ended up buying a used tractor.  That will be in the next post...

Building our new house - the beginning

I've been thinking about ways to update friends and family about our house build project.  I figured I would give a blog a try, as it seemed like it might be easier than building a web site for it (tried that previously - took a lot of time).  So here we go!

I'll start with the background as the initial work began in November 2009 when we started clearing trees.  I'll hit the highlights of the earlier work, and then as we get up to the present, it will be a lot more real-time as I can post pics as we go.  We recently broke ground (June 2013) so it is finally underway in earnest.

If you find these updates to be too much (I am assuming there is a way to update people that something new is posted), feel free to let me know and I can remove you from the list.  I don't want this to be annoying to anyone.


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The start of clearing - Began over Thanksgiving 2009, and continued into Feb for the initial round of dropping and blocking up trees into firewood length blocks.  Here are shots from the first major day of work in Dec 2009.  Here is me with my new Stihl MS362 chainsaw.  I've gotten a ton of use out of that saw the past couple years.  (Poor cellphone photo...)

That is my friend Brook blocking up a tree and a shot of the mess we created in one day.

We completed dropping all the main clearing area and blocking it up that winter (expect when it was below 10 deg - too cold for me to work out in the woods!).  That wrapped up in late Feb 2010.  When spring came, the cleanup and hauling out began.  The intention was to sell this off for firewood as there was so much oak to get rid of, that there was not much else we could do with it.  I gave away a lot of the "lesser" fire wood (Basswood and poplar) as that isn't great to sell, but we sold almost all the oak, eventually.

The property is 10 ac, and was 100% wooded, so we had a lot of work to clear it out for a building site.  Here is a look at what the property looked like before we started, with the approximate area we cleared as the red blob and the driveway path.