Marlborough Express - Weekend Express
Business stacks up for the Woodchuck
How much wood can a woodchuck chuck?
The cold grip of winter is slowly easing, but as days get longer and the mercury starts to rise now is the time to think ahead to next winter and the fuel your family’s need to keep warm.
Young entrepreneur Anna Pettersson, aka the Woodchuck, cares a lot about wood.
She had built a business on stacking wood for the busy professionals and elderly of Marlborough and was surprised at the amount of work she was getting in the region.
‘‘I was stacking up my own wood and I thought, why don’t I get paid for this?’’ Pettersson said.
‘‘I started marketing on Facebook, I created a page and now I have 275 likes.’’
The young mother was growing bored at home, her daughter was getting busier, she was ready to go back to work.
‘‘The Woodchuck is like a little beaver, and we live in ‘The Beaver’ that kind of tied it in,’’ Pettersson said.
Blenheim was colloquially known as ‘The Beaver’ due to its waterlogged past and status as a river port, and while a woodchuck looks similar to a beaver, it is in fact another name for a groundhog.
Now known to many in Marlborough as ‘Chucky’, Pettersson said people just don’t have time to stack wood these days, ‘‘they’re just too busy.’’
Luckily, she loves stacking wood.
‘‘There’s a fine art to wood stacking, every bit of wood is different,’’ Pettersson said.
‘‘I have an eye for wood now, it’s like when you see a chip that you want when you get fish n chips.
‘‘I’m rocking up to people’s houses and they often don’t realise the Woodchuck is a girl.’’
Pettersson hoped the Woodchuck would get to a point where it could cover the costs of her latest business foray, streetwear and skate shop called #OVERFLOW.
‘‘I go to people’s houses where their woodpile is on a lean and I fix it,’’ she said.
Rebuilds, wood stacking, chuck it in a pile, she said whichever a way you want your wood, she can do it. She also has some advice for those DIY stackers, ‘‘Don’t stack a woodpile hard against a wall, it will fall over.’’ She chucks wood throughout Marlborough, check out her Facebook and give her a like. A woodchuck would chuck all the wood he, or she, could.