Loving Life, I didn’t mean to sound histrionic, but only to emphasize that there are different levels of firewood prep.
It’s one thing to have a small emergency supply, as opposed to a full winter’s worth for SHTF. It’s rather like emergency food I suppose, you can have a few weeks stored up, a few months, or a few years – all depending upon how crazy you want to get about it.
I live in the mountains if Vermont, I cannot imagine it is much colder than upstate NY, and our house is well insulated, but if I were to require firewood as the only heat source, plus cooking source, from October to May – and tried to keep more than the main room warm, I would need more firewood than I can store just in the woodshed.
Namelus, your set up sounds amazing! Do you regularly clean the chimneys due to the use of softwood, or do you just let the chimney fires happen and burn it up?