Firewood

Wow, I should be selling wood....we get a logger friend to bring us a load of hollow logs each fall...end up with about 5-6 cords out of this and it is $100!!!! With our outdoor furnace we don't hardly have to do anything but cut lengths and split in half. He has to get rid of these unsaleable logs or pile 'em up in his yard. It is generally well-seasoned and easy to split...not that our furnace cares; it will burn anything. DEE

Around here, there is a huge disparity in the price of a face cord (4' x 8' x 16") of firewood.

It can be as cheap as $35/face cord if you pick it up .........all the way up to $95/face cord delivered (not stacked).

I have sold many face cords of firewood. On my Toyota Tundra pickup with an 8' box, I need a moderate heap over the sides, of loosely thrown wood into the truck to get a face cord.

It is entirely possible to get a FULL cord of firewood in a truck with an 8' box (no, I don't even try it on the 1/2 ton capacity Toyota). The firewood must be stacked......rather than loosely thrown in.

A cord of wood (4x4x8) equals 128 cubic feet. A stack of wood, whether on the ground or on a truck should measure 128 cu. ft. when you multiply width by length by height. It's rare that people will stack it in perfect 4x4x8 foot stacks. When a truck is loaded around here and called a cord, the truck has 4 or 5 rows stacked on it and the wood is stacked all the way to the top of the cab using wood racks. It's generally a half a cord if it is only stacked to the top of the box. if you're not sure if what you are buying is a full cord or not, measure and multiply it. of course if you buy wood that is stacked in the truck split in halves only, then you split it smaller and stack it, it will then measure out less because you can now stack it tighter.

Around here, people sell mostly juniper, oak and aspen, for $80 - $100 per pickup or small trailer load. Some pine, some cedar, but not much of these two. A lot of the city retirees and the people who only come up to their summer homes for the holidays don't mind paying that at all, but I do I burn anything I can find, including the piles of junk wood that folks have in their backyards and "will haul to the dump one of these days". Junk wood, pine, cedar fence posts, cutoffs from the beam plant or lumber mill, if it burns and puts out heat, it goes into my stove.

I think that folks are making a pretty good living selling wood here though. I've heard of men getting permits across the state line in N.M. and then selling the wood over here in AZ where the customers are on the wealthier side... some also travel a ways and cut wood that doesn't grow up here but is in demand by some customers (don't ask which kind of wood, I have no idea). Amazingly enough, those little 5-stick bundles of firewood at Circle K sell too, for a small fortune - even if there's a trailer full of nice juniper parked right next to them and everybody should be able to do the math