Keeping the home fires burning…

All of the work shop space at the Boat Shop is heated by wood. This includes our main 3-story Work Shop, our Restoration Shop and the original Boat Shop that is still used by our Friends of the Boat Shop (FOBs aka volunteers) to build Adirondack Chairs. In addition to heating these spaces by wood, all of our living spaces also include woodstoves to help supplement and offset some of the oil used by our furnaces. This is a lot of space to heat. And, yes, it takes a lot of wood to heat it all. 16 cords of wood a winter, in fact.

Thus, each year in February we purchase a load of firewood that comes to us in log form. Then, throughout the spring, a combination of our apprentices and FOBs use chainsaws to buck up these logs into 14-16inch lengths. Once it is all bucked up, our entire crew takes one full week to split and stack it all so that it can begin to dry out and be ready to be used the following winter.

We name this as a “pay it forward” process. Each year the apprentices burn the firewood that has been prepared for them by the previous year’s crew; a nice connection between each class of apprentices.

If you’re handy with a chainsaw, come on by. We have a little wood to cut up.