Woodshed expansion update
The woodshed
expansion project got
wrapped up this week.
It kind of hurts to think of
a winter fire on a day like today, but it's a warm feeling knowing
we've got a solid, long term solution to keeping our firewood dry.
I'd guess once we get it full
it might last 2 or 3 winters depending on the temperature.
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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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Great looking wood shed you have there. It is going to make all the difference to you this winter when your wood is dry.
Now, don't forget the kindling.
Nice looking woodshed! How big is it? When I used my firewood calculator, I found that I need about 2.5 cords/year. How much do you guys burn?
Man, it would be nice to know that I had two years worth of wood drying under cover.
Mona --- We've already got it planned out so the box-elder and other softwoods get their own side of the shed. No more picking through the stack in search of logs to turn into kindling this year!
Eric --- That's a good question, and one I can't entirely answer yet, unfortunately.... We've only had our Jotul stoves for two winters, so we're still figuring out exactly how much wood we use. (When I have more, I tend to burn more, too....) The old shed barely held enough for a winter if I was very frugal, but I didn't actually measure the structure before we tore it down....
This new shed has interior dimensions of about 12 feet by 7 feet by six feet (in the lower back area), which would mean it could hold about 4 cords of wood if packed to the gills. I think we're only going to fill it two thirds of the way if all goes as planned, leaving an aisle down the middle so I can easily get to our two kinds of wood. As I do this math, I think that the 2.6 cords we'd put into the shed in that case might only last us for a winter and a bit if I go on another writing spree and keep the trailer warm inside. If so, we might expand the shed to the original dimensions we'd envisioned --- partway through the project, we lowered our sights and cut the square footage of the shed in half, figuring the shed was going to be just too huge.
Maybe this will be the year we have a real estimate of how much wood is in the shed going into the winter and have some leftover so I can figure out how much wood we really used!
Roland --- Mostly it's a matter of convenience. When the ground gets muddy, only having to wheel firewood fifteen feet instead of a hundred feet makes a big difference.
But I also suspect a shed dries the wood better since it's open on all sides and gets direct sunlight. We could rig something like that in the barn by cutting away part of the wall, but probably wouldn't want to just stack green wood in the barn as is.