Firewood

When JJ and I first saw photos online of the house we are currently renting, we noticed what looked like a cute little wood-burning stove in the corner of the living room.  How adorable!  Is it really wood burning?  Can't be, we decided.  After all, who puts a wood stove in an area with no wood? That's wouldn't make sense! Laugh out loud.

Turns out, many people would.  Yes, our wood stove burns wood.  And our house is not alone.  It seems absurd, yet somehow people make it work.  What do they burn? Well, wood of course.  Just not regular firewood. I thought we might be able to buy wood, you know, the kind JJ and I used to pick up from the park offices of the provincial parks we used to camp at. The chopped up wood handed out in green mesh bags. It looks sort of like this:

(Please excuse water-marked stolen photo.  It gets the point across.)

Nope, they get a lot more creative than that up here.  You know what is made of wood?  Shipping pallets.  Now THOSE, we have.  Lots of.  All the sealift crates, groceries that are shipped in by boat or by air, building supplies.....Yup.  Shipping pallets are all over the place. Also, people toss scrap wood just about anywhere.  Vacant lots are full of miscellaneous wood pieces from various building projects.

This took too long AND I had to vacuum the back
of the SUV after.  Way too much work.

My mother and I spent a morning one day scavenging wood from around town.  It was kind of a pain, made a mess of the back of the SUV, and it wasn't always possible to tell if all the wood was safe to burn (as in, not pressure-treated).  So, I tried something else.  I got on the Iqaluit sell/swap page on Facebook (the hub of business up here) and asked "Who can sell me wood pallets to burn?" Wood pallets for shipping up here are made on the cheap, so no extra stuff like pressure treating or painting is generally done to the wood.

Better.

I kid you not, within an hour someone had dropped 14 pallets off in front of my house.  We hadn't settled on a price, or even discussed it. I posted on Facebook, went to buy groceries, came home and there they were.  Blam-o.  Instant firewood!

Well, ok, so JJ now has the job of chopping them all up.... But still. Almost instant firewood! The guy who dropped them off sent me a message through Facebook, we agreed on a price, and he came by again to pick up the money.

Are you a lumberjack if you are chopping up pallets
instead of trees?

So why the concern about firewood? I suppose we don't need it.  The wood stove will not heat the entire house, the landlord described it more as "ambiance".  That said, Iqaluit seems somewhat prone to power outages.  In the past month the power has gone out 3 times.  Generally, its brief, however once it was out for several hours.  

Its also crazy windy up here, which isn't good for power lines. The power went out this past Saturday during our first "winter storm" for half an hour. With no trees to slow or block the wind, the snow was blowing around like crazy and wind speeds reached 100 kph (or 62mph). That's not hurricane strength by any means (hello Florida friends!), but that's also just a regular old windy day. (On the Beaufort Scale our little storm would have officially counted as a level 10, or "whole gale".) This time, half an hour of no power wasn't a big deal.  The temperature outside was a balmy 2 or so degrees celsius. 

However, when gale force winds come roaring over the tundra this winter (at -30 degrees and colder), I'm not sure how long our house would stay roasty-toasty with no electricity. Having a supply of wood on hand for emergencies is a good idea.  In a worst-case scenario, we could sleep in the living room and still be warm.

JJ and my mother playing crib (and eating jujubes) in the window-light during one of last month's power outages.
Can you see the fog rolling in over the hill?

After several weeks of sawing wood in JJ's spare time, the large pile of shipping pallets has been turned into a neat little pile of wood in front of the house.  The wood is resting on a single remaining pallet to keep it off the ground, and covered with a tarp to protect it from water/snow.

The tarp blew off during the gale this weekend, but Coraline
took it upon herself to find it and cover everything again. What a great kid!

Ready for a cozy fire.

And we are ready for emergencies! Next up: How to buy food (part 2).

Housekeeping: I haven't advertised for awhile on Facebook, and I know quite a few of you rely on clicking that link to come to the blog. I won't advertise on there every time I put up a new post, that seems too "in your face".  If you want to be notified when there is a new post you can become a blog follower, or click to be notified by email on the main blog page. I'll put a little update on Facebook every 2 or 3 posts for those who still wish to click the link from there. If you missed the post about the Fall Fair, you can find it here.  For the post about fall colours and berry-picking, go here.