![\"With](\"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/12\/with-a-woodpile_-you-need-to-work-on-a-chainsaw-002.gif\")
<\/p>\nBrrrrrr!\u00a0 All of a sudden it’s winter.\u00a0 Real Minnesota winter.\u00a0 Last night it got down to -9 degrees and the HIGH today was a windy 9 above!\u00a0 To top it off, we have a winter storm warning out for tomorrow afternoon, evening and Sunday.\u00a0 Sigh.<\/p>\n
Did I tell you we were behind in getting our winter’s wood on the porch because we were behind in getting the greenhouse done?????<\/p>\n
Suddenly, it’s a must to get a good chunk of our huge wood pile in, under cover before it gets buried in two feet of blowing, drifting snow.\u00a0 And being that David was in school today, I was elected to get done what I could.\u00a0 After he gets back, there’s only an hour before it’s dark, so we’re limited in what outdoor activities we can do.<\/p>\n
Our chainsaw chain was getting dull and I didn’t want to take the time to sharpen it, partly because I knew there was a new loop of chain in a box on the shelf.\u00a0 I knew that I could just throw that on and get to work.\u00a0 So I got out a wrench and took the sprocket cover off and pulled the bar slack to remove the chain.\u00a0 Of course there’s always a huge amount of oily sawdust packed in everything, so I took a few minutes and cleaned it away.\u00a0 Too much sawdust can plug the oiler, bind the sprocket and affect the performance of the saw.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Once clean, I set the saw on top of our woodbox in the kitchen and got the new chain out of the box, hoping that for once, the right chain got into the right box at the factory!\u00a0 Yep.\u00a0 Looked right.\u00a0 Then I carefully turned the chain so the cutting edges were forward on top of the bar.\u00a0 Don’t laugh.\u00a0 Once I was in a hurry and slipped the chain on.\u00a0 Backwards!\u00a0 Was that embarrassing!\u00a0 And it’s easy to do, too!<\/p>\n
I had to loosen the tension on the chain to engage the tightener into the bar.\u00a0 But once the cover was loosely bolted in place, I could adjust the chain tighter so that it just lifted clear of the bar.\u00a0 Then, tightening the nuts, I was in business.<\/p>\n
I cut, split and hauled two wheelbarrow loads of wood, then cut up and stacked a bunch of lengths so when David got home we could get at it hard.\u00a0 And we did.\u00a0 We hauled in five wheelbarrow loads more and put it in our pile on the back porch, split a bushel basket full of kindling, then pulled out more lengths to cut tomorrow morning.\u00a0 The storm should give us tomorrow morning to work.\u00a0 I hope…..<\/p>\n
By then it was dark and we went to work in the donkey pen in the barn to make it more air-tight. You see our cute donkeys thought it was fun to rip the tarp off their gable end of the barn….back when the poop was two feet deep in there.\u00a0 And boy did the wind blow in bad during our last little storm.\u00a0 I had wanted to get that end sealed with nice tongue and groove lumber like the south end, but we ran out of nice weather real quick.\u00a0 So we stapled the tarp back up, nice and tight and packed hay into cracks at the eaves.\u00a0 I’m going to nail a blanket over the door opening so they can come and go.\u00a0 I wonder if they’ll leave it up????\u00a0 If I lock them inside, they get bored and chew the wood.\u00a0 Not a good habit.<\/p>\n
I gave them rubber tubs to play with and they have a round bale of hay to nibble on any time they want.\u00a0 It has pretty much stopped the cribbing (chewing wood).\u00a0 I don’t want to have them start up again.\u00a0 But I don’t want wind whipping snow into the cozy barn, either!<\/p>\n
When we were done, I threw a bale of grass hay into the donkey pen and goat pen so they had a cozy place to lay down when it was cold and stormy.\u00a0 The stars were out bright and the wind had died down when we walked to the house.\u00a0 I went in, but David went out and fired up his snowmobile and gave it a warm-up run.\u00a0 If it snows like it’s supposed to, he’ll be out enjoying all our backwoods trails!\u00a0 Brrrr.\u00a0 I’ll throw another log on the fire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Brrrrrr!\u00a0 All of a sudden it’s winter.\u00a0 Real Minnesota winter.\u00a0 Last night it got down to -9 degrees and the HIGH today was a windy 9 above!\u00a0 To top it off, we have a winter storm warning out for tomorrow afternoon, evening and Sunday.\u00a0 Sigh. Did I tell you we were behind in getting our […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,18],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5095"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5095"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5095\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}