We Have Logs!!!

Clearly, we have been going a little stir crazy, because a mere two weeks after resurrecting the cordwood idea, we are the proud owners of a semi load of logs.  That's about 11 cord.

Here's our thinking - if we want to build next year, we need to get these things peeled, cut and drying, or we're not doing ANYTHING.  So, we need to get our logs put up this year yet. And if our plans change again and we find ourselves not building a cordwood house, then we have a LOT of firewood for our backyard fires.  We figured it was a relatively inexpensive risk to take.

We only have seven acres - at least half an acre of which is road on our long side, and a serious chunk is field - so we weren't in the position to harvest our logs from our own land like a lot of coordwood builders have been able to do.

Our logs are Poplar (also known as Quaking Aspen), so they weren't very expensive, and so far they are peeling pretty easily.  We asked him for all fresh cut, if possible, which he said he could do - but even so, there are many logs which have clearly been on the ground awhile.

We got started on them this past weekend, and made a pretty good dent. I did most of the peeling, while Scott cut them up with the chainsaw (we are doing 16' logs), and we took turns on the splitter.

I have really been loving this tool we got, which pretty much just muscles the bark off the log. (It doesn't look as pretty now - I've rubbed most of the black paint off it).  We got a drawknife, but it's way too small. (Or technically, the logs are too big - they are quite a bit bigger than he described to us, or we would have gotten a bigger knife to begin with).  We know someone who has bigger ones and will let us use those, so we'll be trying that as well.

I'm also loving the log racks Scott built - which we can't seem to settle on a name for, and over the course of the weekend were called: log racks, saw bucks, saw horses, log bucks, log horses and that goddamn thing is in the way.

We ended with kind of an assembly like method going, with me bouncing back and forth on the two log horses peeling, and Scott cutting and splitting.

After seeing how much progress we made (or rather, didn't make), and having done 40-50 logs, we've decided that we're going to switch gears a little and both focus exclusively on peeling.  Since these logs are already cut, they only going to get harder to peel as time goes on, so we want to get the bark off as soon as possible.  Plus, if this ends up taking longer than we anticipate, and we're still finishing up when it gets cold - we can be cutting and splitting without too much trouble, but we do NOT want bark freezing on the logs.