Our new woodshed

Our plans to install our wood stove this past weekend were derailed when we discovered (surprise surprise) that we didn't have all the parts we needed. Some are still on order at Lowe's, and others we'll have to buy in store, but that won't be until this coming Friday. In the meantime, we decided to get a woodshed built!

We bought a few pieces of pressure-treated wood for this project, but we tried to use up a lot of scrap from other projects on this one, particularly as it's hidden behind the house and doesn't need to look pretty.

A cord of wood, according to The Internet, is four feet by four feet by eight feet of wood, so those are the dimensions we used, kicking the front up an extra foot for accessibility--and to allow snow to slide off the roof in the winter.

I love any excuse to wear my tool belt...

Our outer frame is finished! Now to add side panels, a roof, and a floor.

But first, we added side supports for the three stacks of wood that will fit inside. We used more scrap wood here, so the pieces are uneven and mismatched.

While Wendi and I covered the walls with old flooring pieces left over from the construction of our house, Jo was charged with shoveling sand from our leftover sand pile for the base. She ended up playing more than shoveling, but she helped out.

The leftover floor boards were pretty crappy, but still in good enough shape to be serviceable. The best part: they were free! (Or, well, we had long since paid for them already.)

On top of the sand we stacked all the cinder blocks that were--again--left over from the construction of our house.

And the roof too was recycled! These are layered scrap pieces from the roof of our new house.

We had wood delivered the next day. We bought a cord, but the logs were cut to 18" lengths, not sixteen, so we didn't get them to fit three stacks deep as perfectly as we had planned...

They stick out a bit, but we'll have the half a stack piled on the front burned down in no time, and perhaps next time we'll find a supplier with 16" logs instead. 

Moving a cord of wood one wheel barrow at a time from the other side of the house was not a lot of fun, but until the mobile home gets sold and moved, we won't be able to get a pick-up truck back to the wood shed. When the mobile home is gone, we should be able to get the wood a lot closer for loading.

We also bought a nifty little metal rack at our local Ace Hardware for our porch. It holds about a half of the front stack from the woodshed. We'll keep this filled up from the woodshed through the winter so we can grab more dry wood and dash back inside without having to go all the way around to the woodshed, and in the warmer months we'll take it apart and stow it in the storage shed.

Now we just need to get that wood stove installed! In the meantime, at least I have a woodshed to take Jo out behind...