Homesteading Truth #1 - Wood Heat

Truths about homesteading no one ever talks about.  I'm writing this series to help others. It has taken me six years to finally admit some of these truths as I was in quite a bit of denial and we had sung quite the praise about it in a previous blog (300+ praise posts to be exact). When I first started out, I had a lot of romantic ideas. In fact, I suspect my husband is still in denial himself as I write these. He's bound and determined to stay here forever where's I'm ready to move on and start over. That's another blog post. To bring you up to speed, we bought ten acres with a cottage on it with 40 acres of wild woods behind us. The cottage needed "repairs."  I put that in quotes because those repairs finally led to a full home renovation that we are still paying for in loans three years later. More to come on that later.

You know I think this is likely a lot more common than we realize but no one is talking about it. Much like my family member who one day announced they were retiring to travel around the world and came back nine months later broke and had to go back to work world. It happens to the best of us even with the most well laid out plans. I think it took me by surprise because my husband and I are over planners. You know, the kind with spreadsheets and data and stats and lots of research to back it up. We are also savers and frugal whores with retirement accounts so we thought we were safe. But nothing prepared us for homesteading. Nothing.

Homesteading Truth #1 - Wood Heat

Sometimes, I relate to the pioneers that traversed to the West and died.  Yes, the ones that died because I really think had we been pioneers and didn't have access to all of the food and water and instant firewood we were able to buy our first three winters here... we would have died.  Although, I will say that with Mr Monkey working full-time for those first three winters, it was near impossible to really live sustainably.  Living sustainably is well... a full time job.  But then my husband took a full year off and we still never caught up. I think it might be because we were minus twelve kids for free labor. Although, I can see why the mortality rate for kids was 50% at times. So I do think about those Pioneers a lot and how tough it was.  They had to arrive at bare land, build a home, cut firewood and store enough food to get through the long winters.  And some of them only had a few months to do it.  I can't even imagine....

We're heading into our sixth winter here at the homestead and it took us four winters before we had enough firewood.  In fact, we now have enough for three years.  Making up for the last three years?  Possibly.  After three winters of scrambling to buy firewood mid-winter, we'd had enough.  We thought we might be able to cut down enough trees on our property to have enough firewood but with our other projects needing attention - it didn't happen.  Instead, we found someone with a logging truck that brought us three loads of logs for a very VERY good deal. Much better than the typical $250 per cord that the locals charge.  All we had to do was cut it up and Mr Monkey bucked up most of it the first week it was here.  Nice dry, seasoned firewood and as I type... I am warm.  Thank you honey!

Truths you need to know about heating your home with a wood stove:

• You realistically need 7-8 cords for each winter. My husband estimated we need three when we first moved. We were off. Way off.
• It is messy. Really messy. I'm constantly cleaning and dusting my home between the ash dust that floats out every time we open the door to the wood chips that are always tracking their way in each time we bring a load.
• If you are an allergy sufferer, you probably don't want to do this. Pollen spores love to travel in firewood.
• Air quality is bad with a wood stove. Even with the best wood stoves on the market, you will be breathing in a lot of ash particulates. Read below how I finally figured out it was causing my chronic winter cough.
• Firewood is not cheap. The locals here charge $250 per cord for dry seasoned wood. Times that by the 7-8 you need.
• It takes freaking forever to chop it. You quite literally need to chop it every single day in the summer. Every. Single. Day. Hire help if you're gonna do this.
• It can take two years to season. Don't assume it will be ready your first winter. And don't attempt to burn partially cured wood. It is a fast track to poor air quality and clogging up your wood stove pipe.
• It doesn't matter how efficient your home. It really doesn't. We even have water piping heated by our wood stove in our concrete floors and it still gets cold.
• You better love bugs. Because they love to hijack in on your wood.  Whee!
• Mice too. Oh yes, occasionally they will burrow into a hole the size of a pencil and enjoy the free ride into your warm abundantly stocked home. And they have babies every 12 minutes so…. Yeah.
• Expect to be cold a lot. Aww… The cozy wood stove is so wonderful until you wake up the next morning and realize you didn't bank it well enough and it is now 55 degrees in your home and it will take about three days before all the nooks and crannies finally warm up again.
• Expect to be too hot. Yes, this too. I know so weird. Wood stoves don't provide constant stable temperature conditions. So one moment when you're too cold, the next day it will be 85 degrees and you will be cracking your windows.
• Expect it to get old. In our sixth year of using a wood stove, I'm ready for normal house heating. I still love it but I'm over the romantic ideas.
• Embrace sleep piles. Now I understand why pioneers all slept in one room houses. All it takes is one time to wake up and feel the cold freezing hands of your babies and you won't hesitate to keep them with you every night after that. 

Things you need to be able to live in a wood heated home:

• A chainsaw, seriously spend the $800-$1200 for a Stihl chainsaw.  We bought a couple used chainsaws that had been abused by previous owners before we finally said f#*< it and bought a new one.
• An ax and splitter and small hatchet for kindling.
• A Stihl chainsaw repair shop. We are best friends with the guy that runs ours. Not by choice by necessity to survive. You're gonna use the heck out of these things. Get intimately familiar with your machine.
• Dry seasoned wood, this basically means evaporated cured wood. The more sun exposure it gets, the better. It takes us two years to cure ours. But keep in mind that the hot days in August that you think are so wonderful likes to surprise you with a suddenly wet day in September.
• A house for the firewood. Yes, your firewood needs shelter to stay dry. And considering that you need about 5-6 cords of wood for one winter and ideally you store twice as much, you will need a building to keep it dry.  Our building is 20x20 with side protection from rain and pallets on the ground. Plastic covers do not work. When we attempted this, this yielded in moss, mold, mushrooms and more unidentifiable items that begin with the letter M.
• A few strong bodies to chop, carry, chop, carry, hack, carry some, stack, chop, carry some more wood. And woebegone to the ones that throw their backs out. With both my husband I working together, it was still never enough.  These are likely the pioneers that died each winter.
• A space heater. Heck a few of them. Sad but true. You will find yourself buying a few of these for those occasions when you need to leave for a few days and you don't want  your house falling to sub zero temps while you're gone. Or maybe for those times when the fire keeps going out or for when you can't quite get it warmed up enough.

All in all, we have roughly 20 cords of firewood.  Finally!  After six winters, we now know that we go through about 7-8 cords a winter.  And we also know that it MUST be dry wood.  When we first discussed buying the pre cut logs, we both balked.  We really felt like we should be able to cut enough from our own woods and we hate spending money.  But our memories of cold winters past and the constant struggling with green wood, not having enough wood and so on…. finally won through.  Plus, I kinda want to preserve my woods now. Keep in mind it still took us two years to cut and stack and manage those logs. So it wasn't without a lot of effort and labor.

Wood stoves and lungs don't mix well…..

So now we have enough wood to heat a house but don't sigh a breath of relief yet because here is something else we discovered in the midst of all of this. My chronic winter cough I get every winter…. Well, it is cause by our EPA super efficient wood stove. I almost cried when I found this out because we have no other way to heat our home. But I dug around and sure enough Pioneers had something else to contend with:  chronic lung issues caused by wood heat. And the scary thing is that infants and children are the most affected. I discovered that children who grow up around wood heat have more allergy and lung issues later on as adults.  Well… I grew up around a wood stove and I have one currently and my lungs are crap. Great.

Before Mr Monkey and I sold our 20 cords of firewood to buy a home heating system, we decided to try air filters. I bought the Rabbit Air and Whirlpool Whispurer. If you're wondering why I picked them, I picked them because they were the safest for our kids and had very decent ratings. It was almost $1000 for both. Yikes. Then I went through and systematically cleaned my home with a shop vac. It worked. My cough went away in about two weeks and finally I have a winter where I don't sound like I have tuberculosis.  I still cough occasionally but I'm not breathing in as much particulates as I used to and the air doesn't look like we are living in ash world on sunny days when the sun shines through our windows.

I have visions of myself still living here as an old lady with Mr Monkey. Honestly I don't see him having a desire to chop and split wood for 45 days straight every summer. So our long term plan is to get a heating system in a few years and use the wood stove as an enjoyable way to heat our home rather than a must-do.

Stay tuned for Homesteading Truth #2.