As the fencing goes up at a rapid pace, some things around the yard that were being put off are now on the table as far as the need to expedite gets painted on these tasks. If they continue to be put off after the fencing covers the areas around the locations where these tasks need to be performed, it will make the completion of said tasks very difficult.
One of these tasks is the clearing of some old cut tree trunks from a tree that we had brought down around this same time last year. The tree was a tree that was pushed by the straight line winds that came through our area early last year. This tree was leaning by the root ball precariously towards the house so it had to go. After the tree guys dropped the tree, they cut it up into small enough sections that they were able to stack it in what is now the Northeast corner of the compound. These sections are around 8ft long so they would need to be further cut down to move under any circumstance. Either way, before I put the fencing along the east side of the compound, I have to remove these tree trunks. Otherwise they will never be moved. The other problem is the fact that the firewood shed is blocking the area going back to this area almost completely, based on where the fence will go. Of course the firewood shed will need to go in order to open this area up to the rest of the yard. My plan is going to be to move the firewood storage to this very rear most section of the yard, right where the tree trunks sit at. Unlike how I have the firewood stored currently, I do plan on laying gravel down over all of this area to create a covered base with which to set pallets down in order to stack all firewood. Since I have so much firewood and the area will be relatively narrow once the fencing is set up, I plan on laying the pallets and the stacked firewood in a way where there will be a central corridor that will allow us to walk between the stacks of firewood all the way to the back fence. We can then collect the older firewood that will be getting stacked first at the back as well as place new wood on the pallets as we use old wood. Reason why I say I'll store old wood in the back instead of the front is because I want to clear the firewood shed of all its wood so I can dismantle the structure. If I wanted to put new wood in the back first I would end up having to spread a lot of gravel first and lay a lot of pallets and stack a lot of firewood before I can get to the old wood. There's really no way to get the wood staged where the oldest will be up front. We still have a lot more wood and whole trees to cut up. So in the meantime, I have to cut up these tree trunks in the back so I can split them into usable firewood and get the area completely cleared before moving on to the next phase of the project. Since I already used a lot of firewood from the existing stacks, this newly cut wood will go in those opened spots for the time being so there is no new stacks created. After going through another chain on the saw and several battery rechargings, I managed to get all of the tree trunks chopped up, I ended up with a huge stack of raw firewood logs. This huge pile was staged in the driveway where I normally stage wood prior to splitting since the extension cord and log splitter are in this area. I ended up going through a bunch of splitting to get all this wood split up, generating bunches of tree bark from the partially dried and seasoned wood, all of which went into the burn pile. After getting all the wood split up I went ahead and started stacking the wood in one of the spots on a pallet that I managed to clear up. Since the empty spot was right in the middle of the line of firewood stacks, this was a perfect spot to stack the fresh firewood, as stated before, to keep the wood out of the way by not creating a new pile that would break up the straight line of firewood that would be running along the new fence line as its established. Even though all this wood will be moved to the back when the firewood shed is gone and gravel is laid, the last thing I want is for something like a stack of firewood to be dead in the way. Even though we did use a good amount of firewood through the winter, when you look at the pile from end to end, it hardly looks like we dented the pile. The vastness of the firewood pile is so great that we will be set in wood for several years, if we keep the wood preserved and off the ground. This is why I wanted to lay gravel down and put fresh pallets down to set the wood on top of so air can move under the wood as well as prevent moisture from the ground from penetrating into the bottom most pieces of wood. Adding some type of covering, even something as simple as some large tarps, will further preserve the wood enough so that this supply should last us a long time. With the back area cleared I was able to do some extra fine tuning to the area, chopping up old stumps from weed trees I cut down in the past as well as chopping up any new growth that's trying to make an attempt at popping up. I had to remove some old fallen tree trunks that have long since rotted into brittle dusty garbage that was good for nothing other than harboring carpenter ants and other six legged critters. After getting all of this trash removed, I was left with a nice clean slate with which to lay my gravel down and start the building of my new firewood storage area, tucked away enough so as to not take away from the rest of the compound. This little job ran right behind my next task which is going to be sinking posts and finishing up the west side of the fence that runs along the driveway, which will probably net me some extra posts which I will end up sinking along the eastern fence line, which runs right by this area. The sooner I get the gravel down and the firewood resituated the sooner I can jump right to hanging fence panels to fully enclose this area and get that much closer to containing the homestead and getting more critical areas organized.
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