From a very young age I remember my family heating with wood. Our house had a masonry fireplace. And later a wood-fired boiler.

 Early Memories

Up through my early grade school years my father owned his own construction company. Business was good and our heat came in the form of saw logs delivered, for a fee, from a friend at a tree service company. I remember some of these maple and oak logs being larger in diameter than I was tall. The log trucks would drop them right in the drive way and we would turn them into cord wood. I was not allowed outside while dad was bucking logs, but I spent a lot of time watching through the window that over looked the driveway. He had a McCulloch 10-10 saw with a 20” bar. Even from inside the house that saw was painful to the ears. I can’t recall if it had a muffler. If it did, it wasn’t very effective. I’m sure the neighbors were pleased…

I remember the 6 pound splitting maul my father used. It had a lot less duct tape around the top of the handle back then. Around age 5 or six, I was allowed to help with this task. Dad set a round on end about 25 feet from the splitting stump. Whenever the maul was in his hands I had to be standing on my round. He would swing the maul, usually splitting the round into quarters that flew off the splitting stump. Once he set the maul down I was to run over, pick up the quarters to split smaller and set them on the splitting stump, then run back to my round. At the time I remember this being a lot of fun.

After splitting I would help haul the wood to the basement window at the back of the house and throw it in. Inside we would stack it along the wall until the basement was full. I would guess we stored about 2.5 cord in the basement and we refilled it twice on the average winter. We also stored a quantity of wood construction debris for fire starting, 2×4’s, trim pieces and such.

The Work Begins

Sometime in my late grade school years my parents decided to close the construction company and opened a business that serviced commercial kitchen equipment. I don’t remember all the details but it seemed that work came in fits and spurts sometimes but we did okay. We still took occasional deliveries of log trucks. More often we were going to places where forest lots were being cleared or to properties of friends who need downed trees removed. I was not allowed to run a saw but by this time I was hauling logs out on my own and stacking them in the truck. The size of the logs increasing as the years passed by.

By the time middle school rolled around I was running a splitting maul of my own. Oddly about this time more and more duct tape showed up around the handle near the maul head. A couple of times dad made reference to ‘readjusting the sights on that maul’ but it took me a while to figure it out.

About this time the ‘pallet search’ game started. My parents had chosen to transfer us to another school district, that is a whole other story in itself. The commute to school was 15-20 minutes every day. We kept an eye out for scrap pallets and stopped to toss them in the back of the truck whenever we saw them. The pallets were taken home, cut up and stocked for fire starting.

Taking Responsibility

In high school my parents commercial kitchen business ran into some rocky times. The main client was bought out by another company. A company who was much less scrupulous and much more difficult to work with. My father found some work with a local construction company before being injured on the job a few years later. Dealings with workers comp insurance were rather difficult and the family budget was tight. By this time we were taking wood from any sources we could find. I remember some days being down to a small fraction of a face cord in the basement storage.

The pallet search became much more intense. By this time I was running my own saw. A Poulan of some obscure model, with a 16” bar, that a family friend broke and we got for free. I learned a lot about 2 cycle engines in the course of getting this saw up and running. I learned how to sharpen my own chains with a round file. I learned how to set raker depths with a flat file. I kept my saw in my truck when I went to school and would cut at a friend’s house and bring a quarter cord home with me. After my father was injured the brunt of the bucking and splitting labor fell to me. I don’t recall this being any particular hardship, just a chore that needed to be done.

In college I did not do much wood cutting. My landlord wouldn’t allow a stove and I didn’t really have the time anyway. I still spent a lot of time with a saw in my hands while working at the local ski area clearing trails and dead falls. I became a better sawyer though I am still learning to this day. I’ve become pretty good at hanging trees up. When I am felling and want to avoid dropping the tree on something, like my lunch pail, I put the object where I want the tree to fall. Because odds are pretty good that tree is not going where I want it to anyway….

On My Own

This brings us to the present day, a wife of my own, a house and propane at $6.99 per gallon depending on the day. Obviously we didn’t budget for this price spike. Fortunately the previous owner had installed a solid fuel chimney in the sitting room. My wife and I found a wood stove, borrowed a chain saw and I bought my own splitting maul.

I start a fire in the morning when I get up for work and damp it down before I leave. By the time my wife is awake the stove is ready for stoking and she keeps it going the rest of the day. The propane boiler has not fired up in close to 3 weeks. Our property is on the edge of a swamp with 10 acres of standing dead tamarack. I drop the trees then cut to 8’ lengths which are skidded out by hand on toboggans. Splitting seems to be a lot more work than I remember it being, but it is easier to hit where I aim now. It’s a lot of work hauling firewood out of the snowy Minnesota Northwoods. But good wood burns twice.

~~Thank you, Dan. We look forward to those still under wraps! I appreciate continuing the offerings of Mailboxes and Old Barns from commenters. Dan has a few more in the hopper and that’s good – we have had a sneak peak of them in his emails. You’re going to like them!

Thank you all….pop an email to the Treehouse if you think you might have a story to tell down the road a bit. ~Sharon