Kindling

    During the winter we keep our wood stove burning 24/7, so we don’t have to light the stove every day.  However in the Fall and Spring, we wake up to a cold house in the morning and have to start the fire to warm the place up a bit.  To start a fire we need old newspapers and kindling; small pieces of wood that will start burning from the newspapers.  

    In the past for kindling, I would always saw up the smaller branches of trees that I was cutting up for firewood, but recently we visited our friend Jim, who does a lot of carpentry, and noticed that he had neatly sawed up a lot of his left over wood into small pieces to use for kindling. 

    In my life I have gone through periods when I didn’t have a lot of money, and that made me a scrounger and saver.  Whenever I had scraps of wood left over, they always seemed to precious to get rid of, because I would always think, maybe I could use those left over chunks for some project in the future, so I stored them away, very rarely using them.

    I mentioned in an earlier blog how I had bought myself a utility trailer.  After I got it together, I looked around for somewhere under a roof to store it.  The logical place for storage was in my barn.  However the best place in the barn for the trailer, was full of all left over scraps of wood from all my past projects, that I would never get around to using, so I decided I would make kindling out of it.

    I sorted through it, saving a few good pieces, throwing away those that had been on the ground and starting to rot, and sawing up all the rest for kindling.  It was a big job.  The photo above shows one of my many wheelbarrows full of the kindling I produced.

    The sources of this kindling date back from before we bought our house in 1977.  There are pieces of old 2 x 4’s, odd shaped plywood, parts of the wood paneling that lined the walls when we bought the place, leftovers from the siding we put on the house, an old bathroom cabinet I made, and other relics from the past.

    It was a review of my history, sawing all this wood up for kindling.  They will now help keep us warm this winter.

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