Firewood

stacking wood

Despite the godawful sweltering heatwave this week, we’ve been thinking about the coming winter and how to store up enough firewood to get by. We’ve got this marvelous high-efficiency, clean-burning woodstove (or so the salesman said; we haven’t tested it out yet) and we’re planning to close off most of the house and only heat two or three rooms, so we think we can get through the winter with around three to five cords of wood. Earlier in the summer we stacked our first cord neatly and moved on to our next shipment of wood, two cords green wood. Before we got through the second pile, the first one fell over! Argh.

wood stack fell over

So I started scheming… How to make a nice solid woodstack with minimal effort? Richard recommends a row of three cinder blocks on the bottom, each one dug into a little hole and leveled, then two lengths of pressure-treated lumber atop the cinder blocks. This gives a nice level footing and keeps the bottom of your stack up out of the dirt so they don’t get all rotten. I decided to add on vertical endpieces, like bookends, and diagonal supports to hold them up. That way we don’t have to fuss around with criss-cross stacking at the ends.

wood stacking project … in progress

The finished plan called for six cinder blocks, twelve eight-foot pressure-treated timbers, eight giant bolts. Took a bit of trial and error to get it all put together but we did it! We’re hoping it will hold nearly one cord of wood and last a good 20 years or more! If it doesn’t tip over or fall apart. Now we just need to make three more and we’ll be all set!

the new firewood stacks