Artful Firewood

Following on from my barn quilt and building post, I thought I'd show you something else I noticed while travelling.  This was particularly in Newfoundland (by the way, the emphasis is on the 'land', as in New-fin-LAND, it took us a while to get it and we were gently corrected a few times!)

Newfoundlanders need a good source of heat. It gets cold, like really cold! It was Springtime when we were there, and there were icebergs....need I say more?  Lots of houses use central heating with diesel, but lots also have a fireplace, or even a central heating furnace that uses wood.

And the further North we went, the more we saw of these.

Beautifully stacked firewood. If you live rurally, you can get a permit to go and cut your own firewood, and plenty of people do. Then they take the time to stack it in the most eye-catching piles.  I think it helps that the trees seem to grown straight and with not many branches (spruce?) and so they can cut them into these lovely rounds.

Which are particularly artful when you combine this year's fresh cut with pieces that are older and weathered.

And if you don't have time right then to chop them into fireplace sized chunks, you can store them in trunk stacks.

Or perhaps a tee-pee shaped stack is more your thing? I'm presuming this helps with rain run off?

Some people had sheds, but most just stacked it up in rows in their yard. You jam a pole in the ground at one end, stack a line of wood, almost like a fence and them jam a pole in the other end to stop them rolling away. Efficient and lovely to look at.

We saw them everywhere. On the beach even. That's Labrador in the distance. We were up on the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland on the west coast and the Gulf of St Lawrence is only 18 kms wide at the narrowest point. The sea seems pretty calm compared to the wild east coast.

And out in the forest. I think this is a commercial cutter's stack. Still pretty!

Here's the messiest pile we found. And right behind it was a perfectly stacked line of wood, so I'm presuming this guy just went home for a cuppa inbetween stacks. No letting the team down here!

This wasn't actually firewood, I found it by a shed at the hunting lodge we stayed at, right next to a lake. I think it was old poles that had been a jetty. Still stacked nicely!

Our hunky, gnarly manuka and macrocarpa that we use in New Zealand just doesn't lend itself to this artful stacking. But we can aspire, right? 

Do you take care with your firewood, or is it all just jumbled in a pile under a tarp, or piled into a bin?

Next I book a floor sander...

Apologies for the photography - it's such a hard room to photograph in,  night or day.

Phew!  Today was a mammoth painting day.  I painted the third coat on the coving, skirting, window and door trim.  And then I got eager and started on the top coat - just to see what it looked like.  Then my darling hubby bullied me into doing the edges and he carried on rolling on the top coat.  With the end result that I have a top coat on my whole studio!

Now, on Friday when I went to sew with Suz, from 'All the Good Ones Are Taken', she put up with me panicking about how much I hated the colour I had chosen (and bought already) and thinking up all sorts of schemes to try and not hate the colour.  So she'll be pleased to know that I just went ahead and used it anyway.....and I love it!  Ha!

It makes me think of warm and cosy colonial libraries or sitting rooms.  Especially with the white trim and the wooden joinery.  It's a bit darker than I thought it would be, but not enough to get me worried that it will effect the way I see colours or anything.

Speaking of warmth.  We've had another development here.  Hubby was determined to have a wood burner installed by this winter.  Well, it's in and it's warm!  It's plenty big enough to heat the open plan lounge/dining/kitchen and the bedrooms and studio as well.  In fact when we close off the other parts of the house, it gets a wee bit too toasty!  It's got a cooking surface on top so we can save a bit of gas and the best thing is that we have enough land here to grow our own firewood.  We'll be planting some more trees soon with just that in mind.

Hope your weekend was as productive as mine!