okotoks guy said:
I am in a similar boat. Good wood is hard to find and birch is about as good as it gets. Even then it comes froma long way and cost is a fortune.
Where are you located. What was your cost for 9 cord of birch delivered? (if you don't mind me asking.)
If you are near me, I could lend you my gas splitter to bust through your birch and get it drying quickly.
Thank you for the kind offer. Unfortunately, Alberta is a bit too far of a poke to take you up on it. I'm in Fairbanks, AK, about three days' drive from your beautiful province.
The sum they are charging for the nine-cord load, dropped a year ago, is a walloping $1700USD. Sounds staggering until I calculate that this is three winters' worth of the good stuff for me, and that heating with fuel oil (assuming prices don't rise any more) for those three winters would run me nearly 10K. I know that people in some areas--especially where labor prices are low and wood is abundant and winters are mild--pay much less. I get that. That's not our reality.
However, there's a rumor that there's someone around here selling a 10-cord load for $1200, which is why I found myself following a truckload of pretty wood down the road tonight. Everyone else was trying to get around him, and I was trying to stay behind him, calculating cordage and length and diameter, and yearning after all that lovely wood, and when the driver turned off and I kept going, and noticed that another loaded truck that had been behind me also turned off. I turned the car around and headed back and parked behind the second truck. The driver of the second truck had been out conferring with someone, and came back to see what I wanted.
I found myself falling into a sentence that there was no way out of, babbling something to the effect of, "I saw your trucks on the road and was admiring you gentlemen's wood . . . wait. Let me phrase that differently . . . ". I avoided eye contact long enough to allow him to swallow his laughter, proving that he was indeed a gentleman.
He wasn't the one I was looking for, but did have sell four-cord load of green spruce for $500. I've got a lead on some good seasoned spruce (a log cabin that needs to be torn down), so if that pans out, I'm set for mixing wood, but it's good to know he's there.