Beautiful Weekend

What a beautiful weekend here, it got up into the 60s on Sunday. We grilled some burgers for lunch and had a picnic, then I sat out on the recliner reading for a while (Ringworld by Larry Niven, so far it’s great). After I had enough lazing about I built the kids a swing out of odd deck parts left over from the last house. I also saved the end ropes from an old hammock that were exactly the right length. I try not to be too much of a pack-rat, but it’s great when I can build something like this out of stuff I’ve already got lying around.
The hard part was finding a limb low enough to hang the swing from; most of our trees are tall and straight, with no limbs below twenty feet. We have a few Beech trees up front nearer to the street, one with a nice sturdy branch about nine feet up. I’ll try to get some pictures of it up sometime…

Tree Research

I’ve done some looking around, here’s some good info on using your land for firewood. Most of it’s in PDFs, curses, Adobe…

• This one and this one both have charts for calculating the amount of cord wood you can get out of a tree by measuring its diameter. A tree with a 22″ diameter at 4.5′ high will provide a full cord of firewood. We’ve got a good few trees are are about that big, and some larger. Obviously we don’t want to just cut all these granddaddies down for firewood. There seems to be enough for a few years worth in standing dead and unhealthy ones though.
• This one has good info about how much wood you can expect to get out of a given bit of property. It seems that we’d need ten acres of regular forest to get enough wood to heat our house. It says we could do it on as little as two acres but the trees would need to be eight feet apart, that’s pretty close.
• Not necessarily about firewood, but I found this site about the Emerald Ash Borer. I’ve definitely seen these grubs while splitting wood. I’ve have to read more on what to do about them…

The Managing Your Woodlot for Firewood PDF I linked above had some great advice on tending to a forest; how to tell good trees from bad, how close you should leave them together, how close you should plant new ones… I spent a fair bit of time outside this weekend, thinking about what should go and what should stay. Like I said above, we should have enough wood for a few years just cleaning up the old crooked and diseased trees and making room for the healthier and younger one. I also found Indiana’s DNR website. They’ve got a seedling program, where we can get young trees of all types to plant in the back field.

Heating this place.

Since moving in we’ve slowly converted the cabin-in-the-woods feeling of the home to something more convenient and modern. Things like low pressure lukewarm showers, ancient electrical outlets and switches, and leaky toilets are mostly things of the past, but in the cold we still dress in layers of thermals and sweatshirts. We were living on borrowed time there for a bit, Thanksgiving week it got up into the sixties, but as nice as that was the reality of a cold winter and poorly insulated and drafty house have set in. Once again our place feels like something out of a Little House on the Prairie book (well, certainly not that bad, at one point Pa had to shovel and sweep snow off the girl’s bed in the morning before they got up. Now that’s drafty!)

I’ve been splitting a lot of wood lately and that got me wondering if our four acres could produce enough to heat the house. I’ve done a fair bit of research on heating with wood and it’s amazing what can be done with a modern wood stove or fireplace insert. They are extremely efficient, 70% and above on the good ones. By using the forced air system in our house we could heat with wood alone, in theory anyway. The trick is to cover part of the return vents in all the rooms that don’t have the stove so that the furnace pulls more (warm) air out of the stove room and moves it to the cooler rooms.

We’ve got a nice fireplace store close by so this weekend I went and had a good talk with the salesperson there. According to him we’d need between six and eight ricks to heat the house for the winter. It’s a tough call, I’ve got almost that now (not all split yet) with just the wood that fell this spring. I’m not sure if that should be expected and if it’s sustainable out of four acres. If I can work with our neighbors (we’ve all got lots of trees) and maybe start talking to some local tree services I shouldn’t have too much trouble coming up with four cords a year. We’ve certainly got the room to dry and store it, although I have to build something better than just covering the top of the stacks with plastic.

We always just assumed we’d replace the old gas furnace in the basement, but if we’ve got the wood why not put it to good use. (Or at least better use than it being put to now.)

It’s raining

A big storm has been rolling through much of the Midwest. Here in Indy we got a fair bit of rain, a good steady soaking all through the day yesterday and much of the night. Inside it stayed mostly dry, which is a good thing. We’ve just recently had the roof replaced by a contractor who has a great reputation for being very thorough, which we like, but since he works alone (sometimes his daughter helps), it took him a little while to get the roof done. He had gotten the old shingles off and new tar paper on when a big rain storm blew in over night. I got up early and went into the attic to see if things were holding up, they weren’t. We had about a dozen leaks through the roof into the attic, we scrambled for as many buckets and pots as we could. Our contractor came right over and tarped the whole roof which took care of every leak except one around the chimney. The water from this leak was running across the rafters above the living room and dripping into a bowl on the couch. He worked a bit on that leak and finally got it stopped. When the rain let up he finished the roof and it looks great.

Insurance paid for the bulk of the work thanks to a spring hailstorm (the same one that blew over the hickory tree that we’re now splitting). Just in time too, the old roof was in pretty poor shape, many of the shingles had lost all their gravel and more than a few were cracking. We opted for better shingles than were on the roof before. We had the choice of regular three tab 25 year shingles or 30 year laminated shingles. Since the house exterior is brick the laminated shingles, which have a sort of shake pattern, help to break up the square lines from the brick. It looks very good.

The basement last night did not fair so well. Along with the roof the gutters are being replaced and were removed when the dumpster was here. Unfortunately the gutter guy is behind and hasn’t gotten to us yet. All that rain on the roof fell right along the house and soaked through the foundation. This was a real problem when we moved in, clogged dry wells and gutters meant that the basement leaked consistently. I cleaned the gutters (often) and diverted the down spouts out of the non-functioning dry wells and away from the house. This really dried the basement nicely. It wasn’t perfect but we were almost there. Another problem we have is that there are places around the basement where the grade runs to the the house rather than away. We have a pile of dirt left by the previous owners and I’ve got to get around to filling in these low spots sometime. Anyway, the leaks in the basement last night weren’t too bad, mostly just a thin layer of water in much of the basement and some of the garage. There’s no carpeting down there so no harm done.

A bit of research

All this talk about splitting and burning wood has made me curious so I’ve done some searching:

• According to this website a cord (4′x4′x8′) of Hickory has the energy equivalent to 146 gallons of fuel oil.
• This site here stresses the importance of burning seasoned wood. According to them (and a few other sites) it doesn’t matter what kind of wood it is as long as it’s been sitting split and out of the rain for a year. This is interesting as I’ve always been told to steer clear of soft woods like pine.
• Here’s a big list of tips.
• A list of different types of wood and their burning properties. Hickory isn’t on the list but Ash is, apparently it’s one of the best burning woods. Good for us, we’ve got plenty.
• An interesting bit on the physics of what happens when wood burns. The main site has a boatload of great wood burning info. This page in particular makes me think about moving the purchase of a fireplace insert (or a new gas furnace) further up the shopping list. We have a Cozy Grate (pdf) heater which I’m sure offsets the drawbacks listed on the Conventional Wood Fireplaces page, but I wonder by how much…

Working ahead

Since we’re partially heating the house with the fireplace I really want to be sure that the wood we’re burning is well seasoned and dry. I’ve read that it’s a good idea to store the wood covered for a full year to let it really dry out. Each year cut next year’s wood and burn the wood cut the previous. I’m no where near that far ahead, this weekend Naomi and I spent a bit of time splitting and stacking wood and we’ve got about a month’s worth, depending on how cold it gets. We split about a rick and a half, a rick being a stack of wood 8 feet long and 4 feet high. I have in my head plans to build shelters using old shingles the previous owners left in our small barn, but until I get that done we’ve covered the stacks with plastic (just over the top of the wood, we want to be sure there’s plenty of air circulation).

My neighbor down the street, who repairs welding equipment for a living, built a log splitter back when they used to heat their house primarily with wood. He brought it over to my place a few weekends ago on extended loan. It’s really quite a contraption, it’s got an old four cylinder farm utility engine, uses leaded gas, and starts with a hand crank. It’s built on an old car front end (bolted and welded so the wheels don’t turn) and a steel I-beam for the ram and wedge.

Around the house in the woods are quite a few piles of old cut wood that’s never been split. Last year this is what we burned in the house and I spent a few hours every other weekend chopping this wood with my axe. I’ve learned the hard way to buy good tools, so my axe is a nice Fiskars, it has an extremely sharp edge that expands into a nice wide wedge. I could split all but the largest pieces with one swing. It was good work, a great workout and afterwords I had a nice pile of fresh-split wood. Friends at work kept asking why I didn’t rent a log splitter, I just didn’t think I needed one, my axe and I could handle any of the wood I was chopping. Then this spring one of the large Shagbark Hickories in front of the house blew over in a storm and I tried splitting one of those pieces with my axe. It was rather deflating when the axe head bounced. I didn’t try using a wedge, but I couldn’t get anywhere with just my axe. Needless to say, the log splitter has been great to have around this year, now that we’re burning real hardwood.

It’s getting cold…

Winter’s on the way and the ancient gas furnace and horrible insulation in the attic make for a cold house. We could keep it warmer, but it’s expensive. The gas company said our old furnace is only 30% efficient, that’s a lot of heat going up the chimney. Hoping to keep the house warmer this year we’ve been replacing the insulation in the attic.

The roof has leaked a few times in the past, so some of the insulation that’s there has gotten wet. It leaked so bad for so long that holes rotted in some of the roof decking, allowing access to critters as large as raccoons judging from the size of the poop that’s up there. We’ve just had the roof replaced and the holes in the decking were repaired. Obviously we didn’t want to just blow in new insulation over all that, so we’ve been shoveling and rolling up the old insulation and laying down new R30 fiberglass batt insulation. The plan is to eventually roll un-faced R19 over that, but for now we’re trying to just get the first layer done.

By far this has been my least favorite job yet (well, aside from replacing toilets, but that’s such a small job, no where near a scale like this). I’ve really enjoyed the other work on the house, plumbing, electrical, carpentry, there’s a lot of room to do things right, especially after all the clumsy repairs done on this house before us. It’s nice to see progress up there, but it’s hard work without the fun of an elegant solution or power tools.

It’s about time.

I’ve been thinking of starting a blog since we moved into this house a year and a half ago, July 2005. Naomi and I have gotten a lot done since then, lots of cleaning, repairing, updating, removing, replacing… We’ve only just begun to scratch the surface. We’ve got a lot of stories to tell and plenty of photographs sitting on hard drives. We’ll have many more given how much is left to be done.

To start at the beginning: We were growing very tired of the cramped quarters in our house so we began looking around. We wanted a larger home but nothing huge, more than the house though we were looking for a little room outside. In our searching we stumbled across a fixer-upper on four acres near Eagle Creek. It needed work but I had built a deck on our small house the summer previous and felt that maybe I was up to the task. It would certainly be worth it, four wooded acres with apple trees, blackberries growing wild, a small stream (Falcon Creek) running through the middle.

Inside there was plenty to do. We had mice in the attic, basement, and kitchen, leaks in the basement (both from plumbing and through the foundation), walls that had to be torn down and rebuilt because of water damage (the roof had been fixed before we moved in), a kitchen that needed serious cleaning, and a long, long list of other repairs and updates.

We’ve had a great time so far. For the most part we’ve kept pretty busy; other than a long break this summer we’ve worked consistently on the house and the property. Thanks for coming by, hopefully I’ll be able to keep this updated regularly. Given what we’ve done so far, how much we are getting done now, talk about the kids, the dog, the fox, squirrels, woodpeckers, flooding streams, absence of updates here won’t be for a lack of things to say.