Our Wonky Little Wood Shed

After coming down off the elation of having procured the equivalent of 14 cords of firewood for the price of 10, it occurred to us that we needed somewhere to put it all.

There isn’t a lot of spare room on a two-acre farm.  The house itself takes up space, and then there’s the garage/barn, the goat area, the pig area, the chicken coop, the front garden, and the back garden.  We were starting to clear out the kids’ closets to stack it in there when it occurred to us that we could build a little shed alongside the garage.

We laid down some pallets and started to map out the available space.  It wasn’t much, but it was a definite improvement over the giant pile at the end of the driveway.  Fortunately, our friend Chris never came by to pick up the auger we’d borrowed from him months ago, so we were able to really sink the four support posts down into the ground providing the illusion of a sturdy foundation for this structure.

Pallets are available for free at our local lumberyard and we had three posts leftover from a previous job.  Our neighbor, Lee, had a post laying around that he let us use, and the sheet metal for the roof was leftover from when another friend’s barn came down and he let us grab what we wanted.  Our only expense were the 2x4s and 2x6s we needed for the roof supports.  There is something incredibly wonderful about building something essential with materials gotten for free, or almost free.  We have had the great fortune of doing this with three of the four structures we’ve built so far.

Laying down sheet metal over the supports was a simple endeavor.  We’ve done it several times now, so we’ve learned how to do it efficiently and with a small amount of expertise. My favorite part is cutting down the sheets or, more specifically, watching Dave cut down the sheets.  Every time I try to do it, I feel like I’m being pelted with needles.  It’s better to watch… like our own little fireworks display.

And so we finished fairly quickly and we think it’s possible the structure may even stay standing through the winter.  It will be exciting to see how much firewood it holds.  It will be incredible if we actually manage to move all the wood from the yard to the shed.  I’m feeling fairly Tom Sawyer about the whole thing at the moment.  After all, stacking firewood is SO MUCH FUN!  Anyone game?

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