Assuming spring comes at least close to on schedule, it looks like this will be the first year ever when we didn't have to ration firewood toward the end of the winter. In fact, we're still burning wood marked for January and will likely continue to do so for another week. In other words --- there's quite a bit more fuel waiting in the shed.

One of my original plans for this winter was to build another woodshed so we could sock away the next year's firewood while burning the previous year's stores, allowing us to get a full twelve-plus month drying period in. But we've only been filling our shed about halfway full in the past, meaning we could actually keep two years' worth of wood under our existing roof if we rearranged the opening. So our new plan is to block off the current open side and open up one of the long sides, then divide the shed in two. Hopefully the result will be two stacking areas with very little extra expenditure of materials.

The only downside? We need to entirely empty this shed out before we can start refilling it since we'll be stacking wood in the opposite direction. Better start moving that extra wood to the back porch so we can clear our canvas and start reinvisioning our new shed.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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