Wednesday, December 03, 2008

Woodshed wall project

Our house's design features a two-car garage which is about 3/4 of a larger room the whole width of the house. Of the remaining quarter, about two thirds is "indoor" space, our utility and laundry room. The remaining niche is an unheated, unfinished area off the main garage, just the right size to hold four cords of stacked firewood.

In the past we've bought seasoned firewood, and had it dumped in the garage to be stacked directly. The problem with that is rotating your stock. You don't want to wait until you're completely out of wood to get more, particularly since you can only get wood at some times of year. So you're always stacking newer wood in front of older wood, and thus, using newer stock before older stock. That's not good, but it's not a crisis; the older wood won't likely "go bad".

But now that we're getting green wood (both buying some, and cutting my own) it's become a greater hardship. Now when I get green wood I have to stack it to season. Can't do that into the woodshed because it would block off the seasoned wood. But that means I either have to then use it from where I stacked it (and lose the advantages of the woodshed being easy to get to even in winter), or restack it after it's seasoned (and stacking wood is miserable enough without having to pick it up, haul it around, and then stack it a second time).

It occurred to me that what I should have done is made two half-sized woodsheds. At any given time one would hold seasoned wood and one would hold green wood. Once the seasoned wood side was empty, the other side's wood would now be seasoned, so I'd just switch which was which.

And then it occurred to me that I probably can add such a dividing wall myself. I have struts overhead and studs on the back wall to which I can attach a simple studs-and-plywood wall. I won't have an easy way to attach it to the concrete slab of the woodshed/garage, but I'm not sure if I'll need one.

So this is my project for the spring. By then, the woodshed will be empty, almost certainly (or near enough as makes no difference). No sense in struggling to do it in the cold when I have to wait for the space to be clear anyway. But as with many projects once I get the idea I'm itching to find time to do it.

1 comment:

litlfrog said...

Wow, that sounds like a really good project. I'm sure that's something you could do.