Got Wood?

Oh, yeah, baby.
I got wood.
Lots and lots of big, hard wood
Wanna see a picture of my wood?
You know you do…

What?
Were you expecting something else?

Yesterday, on his day off (because Firefighters work less than trust fund babies), Brian ordered 3 cords of wood to be delivered to the house.

If anybody is unsure how big a cord of wood is:

A full cord is a large amount of wood. It measures 4 feet high by 4 feet wide by eight feet long (4' x 4' x 8') and has a volume of 128 cubic feet.

In other words, we had 384 cubic feet of wood dropped off in our neighbor’s driveway yesterday that needed to be moved and stacked.

Of course, I was at work, stickin’ it to the man in between facebook visits and coffee refills. Brian, suddenly realizing that he might have bitten off more than he can chew, was faced with the task of moving all this wood by himself.

Needless to say, when I got home last night, he was sore, exhausted, and 4 beers deep.
Poor baby.

Having a fireplace insert is a great thing. We went from spending about $600 per month to heat our house (oil heat), to spending $600 in wood to heat our house for the entire winter. Seriously, think about it. One month’s heating expenditure now gets us through the whole winter.

Awesome-sauce.

Of course, there are some drawbacks. For one thing, the front of the house, where the insert is, gets sit-around-in-your-underwear toasty, while the back of the house is akin to a nuclear winter. To solve this dilemma, Brian and I are planning on literally cutting a big hole in the wall that separates the living room from the hallway to the back of the house, so the hot air can mosey along to the back bedrooms.

Another drawback is that fire requires a great amount of attention to start and a moderate amount of attention to maintain. But then again, it’s kind of a cool chore to have. I’d rather come home and be faced with the task of lighting a fire than, say, emptying the dishwasher or cleaning the bathroom. Kind of makes me feel like a pioneer or a caveman. It’s a welcome change from staring at a computer screen all day.

The thing about a fireplace insert is, you kind of start obsessing about wood. Like, you stand in front of a beautiful oak tree, which has probably been around since the revolutionary war or some shit, and all you’re thinking is, “I bet that tree could heat my house for a long time.”

And then you kind of stare at it creepily with Deliverance eyes and push your fingertips together and calculate ways to chop it down, and all I can say is it’s a good thing that trees can’t A) read minds, or B) move around, because I would have been squashed SO FAST by the first mighty oak I encountered since installing that bad boy.

It’s also kind of comforting to know that, no matter what goes on in the world, we will always be warm. Like, the power could fail and we could run out of gas and society could cease to exist as we know it, but we would still have a way to heat our house through the winter. Granted, we’d probably be eating the pets at that point, but I’m willing to bet that Milo would actually be pretty tasty if roasted over an open flame.

(All kidding aside; seriously, Milo, get your shit together or I’m totally going to eat you)

So with this latest delivery of GINORMOUS proportions, we will have enough wood to heat us through the winter, and then some.

It feels good.
VERY good.

But then again, I wasn’t the one who had to move it…