One of the main problems we had with the original ahousenearyou house was the constant cold. The house was bitterly cold all year round. While this was good in summer, in winter it made you yell and scream. It made you angry. It made you want to move house, and as a result, we did.

We've been in the new house over a month now, we really like it and we're particularly happy with the fact that it's quite warm. As I write this, I'm in short sleeves. With the warmth of the laptop on my ... well, lap, I would probably be quite comfortable in shorts as well.

As much as we'd just love to magically rub our hands or two sticks together and have heat, it just doesn't happen that easily. It requires wood, it requires a fire.

Tonight, I arrived home and found 2 tonne of wood laying in the driveway. Terrific! I thought at first. This would provide us with warmth all through the winter. Then it dawned on me… the wood was outside the garage, it needed to be moved in. It was indeed going to be a titanic effort, only without the sinking… or the movie.

Above is what 2 tonne of wood looks like. It doesn't really look all that bad you might think? Yeah? Well it does, it sucks a lot. So to make it suck a little less, you introduce an old friend to make it a bit easier.

No, not Stu.

Beer.

When moving literally tonnes of wood, you need to be disciplined. We decided that for every 20 logs of wood each that we moved, we'd allow ourselves to have a swig of beer.

We started off slowly, moving wood isn't as easy as it would look… actually, I guess it doesn't look that easy, but we started… one by one, pieces hit the woodpile. At first we were throwing them, hard. I started to get a bit scared though and convinced Stu we shouldn't throw them so hard. I'd heard too many stories about kids trying to slam dunk basketball rings attached to their garage and pulling half of the garage down on themselves, resulting in death, injury and a most impressive dunk. I didn't want to become just another statistic of garage collapses, so we calmed down.

Tell me more about this fantastic wooden voyage. ->
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