These Two Hands

Well, nearly done anyway. We now have a huge pile of firewood to stack and arrange, plus a pretty epic cleanup down by the pond once that’s all done.

We also ended up with quite a little stack of logs that were way too long for the splitter (how we cussed those lazy tree guys!), which now have to be moved again to become garden pathway edging. A few of them will become pondside benches too – you can see one in the last photo.

We split the rest of the logs on Sunday. Josh worked 9-4; I worked 10-dark and then got up and worked again Monday morning before the splitter was picked up. I hadn’t realized how much fun the splitter was or I would have kicked him out much sooner. I had thought he was manfully granting me all the less-taxing work like moving and stacking firewood and fetching and piling up all the logs within his easy reach…. but turns out, the splitting itself was the best part! Power tools are amazing.

It was a long, hard weekend. I believe it was the hardest I’ve ever worked in my life. Josh was ruined. I’m still a bit sore.

The logs are gone.

They’re finally, finally gone. After over a year of being a rankling eyesore and a pain in the butt.

I did find some “before” pictures for ya. Here’s one end of the pile:

And it stretched this long (actually, longer):

And now we are free of it.

It looks like hell and I can see a lot of landscaping in my future (something to cover up that ugly pump, for sure!) But that’s ok. Because it is impossible to be more of an eyesore than it was before.

Because now I can get to my garden without having to trespass on the neighbor’s property.

Because I no longer have to fear that area is infested with snakes.

Because now we have enough firewood for 4 years… which, once ash, will improve soil where those trees once grew.

Because now there is space for a weeping willow, and a winding path, and wildflowers.

It feels good.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 29th, 2011 at 4:43 pm and is filed under garden & farm, House, homesteading, before & after. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.