Gleaning for Your Home

You're trying to pay your mortgage off early so you can save tens of thousands of dollars in interest - what I call "excess interest."

Do you enjoy other ways of saving money, too? In my last blog I talked about dumpster diving to collect 1st quality construction castoffs for various home repairs.

This morning I was out the door by 5:45, because yesterday evening on the way to a publishing lecture, I'd seen fireplace lengths of juniper and pinion along the cut where the new road is going in. I get envious when I see juniper, because it smells so wonderful in the fireplace, especially when we're burning the much hotter local pines that smell pretty much like burning coal .

The Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT) is very kindly cutting up the trees they doze for the road, so neighbors can use the wood. The more we haul away, the less they have to run through the chipper and load into a dump truck, so it's a nice relationship.

Before I finished loading the Jeep, workers were arriving at the site. I had one tarp in the back filled up to window level and another over the passenger seat stacked as high as was safe. It was thrilling to bring home a load of high-quality fuel at virtually no cost. I'll go out again tomorrow morning if there are still logs to be gleaned.

We already have enough firewood to heat our beautiful home next winter. We've collected from other road cuts, and from the golf course when it cleaned out its stash. As you can see from the photo, some of the cottonwood rounds aren't such good burning wood - nor are they easy to split because of their tangled fibrous structure - but we enjoy all of it because we benefit from the exercise as well as from heating our home with a glass-faced wood bringing stove.

We'll gather as much as we can for the future, because this major road construction is going to happen just once in our lifetimes. Since we don't have a truck to head to the usual permitted mountain areas for firewood, it's a fabulous gift to be able to glean close enough to home to make several trips when that doens't interfere with the construction crews.

Besides with firewood around $225 a cord, and needing 1 1/2 to 2 cords per winter, not spending that provides an extra $400 we can apply toward paying off our home and retiring without a mortgage.

What do you do to save that's also fun?