... but I'm *really* happy with this new toy :



My house is built around a big masonry heater which does a pretty good job of heating the place as long as I burn a couple of medium-large fires a day in it. The downside has always been the pain-in-the-butt nature of hauling in enough firewood, particularly since there is a high efficiency furnace just begging to take care of the heating with zero effort on my part

Anyways, after a couple of attempts at cobbling together some kind of cart arrangement for hauling firewood around, and always failing because the wheels were too small to navigate the land, the gravel driveway and the stairs/porch, I finally weakened and picked up a ready-made firewood cart with 20" wheels. What a difference; it used to take more than one trip to bring enough wood in for a single fire; now I can bring enough for 3-4 fires in with a single trip. The firewood rack is finally filled up after living here for a few years.

The nice thing is that I can wheel this around the property cutting up fallen trees without wishing I had a tractor or a horse to haul the wood out. It's also pretty good for hauling out the occasional "what the heck did I put in this ?" heavier-than-spec garbage cans.

Nice, I could use something like that for carrying wood for my smoker. I use a wheel barrel right now.

Where did ya get it?

They're made by Carts Vermont and sold in Canada by Lee Valley Tools. There's a dealer list on the site somewhere :

http://www.cartsvermont.com/

Lazy. I carry each load of my natural gas in my lungs.

I think the natural gas forms somewhere further down your system...

Geez, I just derailed my own thread...



Note to self... wasps build nests under downed trees & cut-up pieces. If you go around picking up all the pieces at the same time you will get many many wasp bites.

Stupid cart.

Pretty cool, John. Isn't it great to find a product that actually does just what you need done?

I coulda used that sucker for my last portage this weekend.

Life's too short to not have the right piece of equipment for each job.

Damn, I have to remember to tell my wife that next time I want a woodworking tool!

You may also want to keep an eye out for termites. We *used to* keep our firewood inside until the little buggers decided to swarm one night. Good thing we have the house treated with Termidor. But just the same, we're not taking chances.

Scott

That's a good point. I keep my burning wood at the far edge of our property, just in case.

Haha I was staring at the picture looking for the hole where the dumb waiter type contraption was lifting up wood from your basement for you. I didn't even see the cart until a second look.

I thought about a firewood lift, but since I decided not to have a walk-out basement I would have to carry all the wood *down* the basement stairs first. Building the firewood storage right into the living room wall next to the masonry heater seemed like a lot less work all round

So... update on the wasp situation. I was trying to find a good way to encourage the wasps to relocate away from the house without actually killing them. I went out early this morning to see what time they became active (the nest is on an east-facing hill so the ground warms up early in the day) and discovered that during the night an unidentified animal had dug up the nest and presumably eaten everything that was not already on airborne alert.

It felt good crossing that task off my list.

Should be easy to identify with all the stings.

Probably a skunk or racoon after the grubs, yummy!!

I'll leave a dish of calamine lotion out tonight and follow the trail in the morning...

Looks like me in a monkey suit.

I used to have a bad problem with wasps in my mini barn until one year I saw this red, mud cocoon looking thing being built over the inside door on an old paint roller handle. Turned out to be a mud wasp nest. Watching her build it out of good ol' PEI red mud was fascinating so I let her finish. I only ever saw one of them at a time so it wasn't very intimidating.

I was later told by a friend and professor at the local vet college that it is wise to let them build as they are solitary, very docile unless physically handled and they don't defend their nests. Despite that, just their presence seems to discourages the more aggressive and swarming paper wasps from building nests close by.

My tenant is on her fourth year of rebuilding her home and I have never even had to complain about the noise.

So... update to the original picture. I realized that the big chunks of firewood were too big for the "fast hot" fires that a masonry heater likes (especially when the new load of firewood arrived at ~30% moisture content) so am now in the process of filling up with the same wood split 4-6 ways. It looks much nicer (will post a pic when I get it filled again) but with the recent storm and requisite 20x28 tarp over the woodpile my rate of wood-bringing-in (there's probably a German word for that) has dropped back down to "pitiful" despite the nice new cart.

On a positive note, for anyone who has read R A Lafferty's "Been a Long Long Time" my woodpile now looks remarkably like "a cubic block of granite one parsec on a side", although it's blue rather than the black I imagined from the short story.