Wood, wood and more wood

In what has become an annual tradition, I spent Friday and Saturday cutting, splitting and moving wood up at Ricardo's country house in Wisconsin. Poor Ricardo was sick with a cold, so he could only help out a little bit, so the task was mostly left to Bill the Bear, Smitty and myself. We did have help on Saturday from another friend of Ricardo's who came for the day, Tony. The weekend started out rough with Ricardo being sick and the TV being out. We weren't going to watch a lot of TV, but it's nice to catch parts of the college football games. So we were a bit behind the 8-ball. But enough words, pictures tell the story best:



The objective: fill this shed with split wood. There are two rows in this picture and the full shed has three. We'd have to move this wood out and put the freshly split wood in the back and then ensure that this wood was used first by stacking it in front. In retrospect, since the wood we were splitting was four years old, we probably could have left it there.







Three of the men for the job: Smitty, Bill and me. The brand new log splitter is about to be christened with a beer bottle.













And Ricardo is added in this picture....in all of his sickness glory.











But how exactly do we start it? Where are the directions?? Have no fear, we got it running in pretty short order.










The first big load we split, was the equivalent of one good sized tree.....about 75 feet long I'd guess. We gave that wood to Ricardo's 70+ year old neighbor who decided not to split wood this year because it was just "too much" for him. He has helped out Ricardo often over the years.














The other four loads were with a slightly smaller trailer, but still quite a bit of wood.

















Though there was wood to split which had been cut last year, we opted to split all of these huge pieces laying around the bottom of this picture. The median piece of oak was 3' in diameter and 2' thick. they were big and heavy, which is exactly why they had been sitting in this wood "pile" for four years or so. We decided to have at them though and save all the stacked wood for splitting next year.





The after photo! What a difference!!














And of course the goal of filling the shed was achieved. Ricardo and wife (and guests) will not be cold this year!! Now if only I can get up there on a weekend OTHER than wood cutting weekend.