About Me

We moved out to Portugal to live a frugal but better , simpler and peaceful life, our house is a very basic, semi ruin, up in the hills outside Figueiro Dos Vinhos, where we work our land, enjoy life with each other and our dogs, and hope to make the smallest carbon footprint we can,

Friday 28 November 2008

Wood, wood, tons of it...

As the weather has now definitely changed to winter, with good hard frosts four nights running now and temps below 60 during the day, (yeah yeah I know.... but to me its very cold! ) We have been working on the log situation, luckily for the first year since we've been here, we are doing well, we have plenty and are able to share them around a bit to our friends who are not so fortunate or fit enough to drag them out of the forest. Rik went out into the forest yesterday and managed another trailer load which he chopped and I stacked, we've been using the range now about two months and actually have more wood than we started with... what a result. Logs are the most vital thing to us during winter.
We set aside a day here and there all summer to get the barn filled and continue as long as the weather allows, we use an amazing amount of logs, it fuels the range which heats the kitchen and cooks all our food, plus we have Big Bertha upstairs which heats the whole top of the house we only light her when its really cold though. We have managed to start putting next years aside too, green stuff that needs the year to season and dry out and it makes me smile just looking at it all... I bloody hate being cold.
Anyone thinking of buying here, think about your heating and how you plan on doing it... we are fit and healthy and it takes up an enormous part of our time to amass enough wood to last. But on the other hand, we heat our house and cook for free 7 or 8 months of the year....