Casa Random now has a chainsaw!

The pile of freshly slaughtered conifers in our driveway has been steadily growing. Our allotment mates could not believe their luck -- they had taken down these overgrown trees and had been struggling to find a free or at least cheap way of getting all that wood off their property. The local council only allows a carload per week and at that rate it would have taken them at least a month to shift it. They could have paid to have it removed, but they did not want to do that. The beauty of allotment communities is that there's usually someone who'll be interested in relieving you of your waste. We look at the 2.5 cubic metres of dead conifer and see free heat next year.

But we also need to upgrade our gear. Our experience with the scrounged sycamore trunks, some of which are still in the Holzleg because neither my zombie axe nor my wood grenade has coped with them, has taught us that we need a chainsaw. My mother and my father, see a previous post on the topic, strongly believe in the idea that a woman must have a chainsaw and have very kindly offered to sponsor one. So we've hummed and ha'ed for many months over whether to go for a petrol-powered one or an electrical one, and in the end we decided on the following today:

* a new Bosch AKE 35 S electrical chainsaw, which was massively reduced in a sale round here.
* chainsaw protective gear (gloves, chaps, helmet and vision protection)
* a sawhorse (yet to buy -- they didn't have one in stock yesterday)
* ultimately, a petrol-powered generator (will usually be stocked by Aldi or Lidl every few months) so that we can power not just a chainsaw but also other things on the plot or wherever: a pump to get river water up the path to our waterbutts, saving us the effort of toing and froing with buckets and a handcart, and a strimmer... how cool would that be?

Yesterday, OH shot off and bought the chainsaw and the protective gear and we caught a break in the so far unrelenting weekend rain and began cutting the conifers into logs. I'm currently under the weather with a cold and bronchitis so I begged off using unfamiliar cutting equipment on that particular occasion but OH reported that it went through the trunks "like butter" and in the space between rain- and thunderstorms, we managed about four armfuls. We'll be much faster once we have the sawhorse as well.

Must make sure to secure it all though: a few nights ago, a bunch of chancers tried every car door down our  street and our neighbour had workgear nicked from his van, very frustrating for him. I just hope they took one long look at our DIY planters outside and the pile of cut wood and the rickety fence and the small inexpensive second-hand car and thought to themselves, ah, a bunch of crusties, nothing to fetch here but pots of homegrown parsley and holey Peruvian jumpers smelling of wet sheep...