The winter is a great time to dream up ways to make your firewood operation more efficient. What projects do you have planned for this coming year? I always have a million ideas and projects, and I genuinely love building things. My upcoming projects will be: #1. An uglies bin, probably 6’x6’ or 8’x8’, with roof #2. Adding another section to my woodshed, so it’ll hold 8 full cords instead of the current 6 #3. Building a bigger sawbuck with fork slots. It will be big enough to handle at least 16” diameter x 10’ long log. Movable with tractor #4. Attempt to sell some stuff, and obtain a road legal dump trailer #5. Get to a full 2 year plan #6. Clean up more deadfall on my 21 acres #7. Make table for splitter pieces to stage on. Likely tractor 3 point mounted #8. Have fun In no particular order! What are your projects???
My woodyard, from leveling out some racks, to figuring out where to move some racks to. I have some foot diameter concrete stepping stones. Maybe, 2 in thick. They were destined for a dumpster, so I grabbed them. They make good footings to place 2x4 racks onto. Thus, the leveling. Currently, runoff from my screen house roof, is right above some racks. They are covered, but, I'd like to see them elsewhere. A covered place for uglies, sounds great.
My upcoming projects all involve getting out of bed in the mornings. That seems to be enough for me to be working on right now...
I'll put up another shed in 2020 - I built two little sheds this year, and pulling dry, covered wood from sheds ten feet from the stove room is fantastic! One more should give me enough storage to get a full season's wood under cover. I'll put a roof over the spot next to the back door where I keep the pine, too. And after a light year of scrounging, I will get back into full scrounge mode again in the coming year. I also hope to process everything already here and get it drying. I've got next year covered, maybe part of the following, but there's 4-5 cord of softwood yet to process, and a cord or two of mixed sugar/Norway maples and red oak that need to find their way into the stacks.
Thinking of a 10X8X8’ tall wood shed and an ugly bin. I’m sure getting sick of looking at the covers on my stacks.
Thinking about having a basement built under the cottage. And having a well installed. Might as well move, no?
I’ve been thinking about adding another bay to our wood shed. That’d allow us to get 10 cord in the shed which is two years of burning for us. Would also like to build a kindling rack in the wood shed. Big enough to hold two or three years worth. Right now I split enough hemlock kindling for one year at a time and stack it inside by the stove. That works just fine but keeping it outside and hauling in a box of kindling as needed wouldn’t be an issue. An uglies bin would be nice. That’d be a good addition to a 3 or 4 cord wood shed next to the new sugar house. That might take priority this summer - get rid of the tarps covering the sugaring wood and build a small covered wood shed next to the sugar house.
I've got to build a woodshed and a well house. Right now I've only got a delapitaded crib that holds a little less than a cord. Gonna see if I can do about a 16'x9' footprint for three 4'x8' stacks, two of them would be back to back so one faced outside on an end, then the two on the inside of the shed would have a 3' or so walkway in between. Figure if I average the inside height under the shed roof to about 8' I should be able to get 6 cord out of the weather. That's near on a 3 year plan for me. Certainly will cover 2 years worth.
My indoor project for the winter is to build a bandsaw blade setter for the sawmill. I have a grinder but I have a few blades that hit metal and need set also. I have one drawn up on a napkin that will do 6 teeth at a time. It should work well for the blades I use, but I'm not going to try to make it versital that will work with all size blades, just the ones I use. My outdoor project is to get the underbrush cleared out of an 8 acre section of woods and plant Walnuts in that area next spring. I have a 55 gallon drum half full of hulled and washed walnuts sitting by the woodshed, squirrel proofed (I hope). LOL
I am enjoying a brief break from firewood. As with anything you enjoy, too much of it can make it feel old after a while.
What are you going to do with all those walnuts? They would make a pig pretty tasty... or will they be people food?
My winter project this season is to finally get back to the woods and slide logs on snow, out to my CSS area. Been quite a while. I'm revamping a tracked powered wheelbarrow so it can move and pull logs, on sleds... at mule speed... ... slow and steady. If I'm lucky, I'll have a decent pile of logs by spring.
Tell me a little more about the process of building a basement under an existing house. I have a partial basement, I’ve thought about extending it into the crawl space to add 300+ sqft of man cave and mechanical room. I’ve looked for a used conveyor to expedite the process but haven’t found anything that not stupid expensive.
It would have to be done by a contractor capable of raising the cottage/house, then excavating and building the basement. Finally, lowering the house and landscaping. In my case, I wish to have a walk out basement at grade level so that would entail additional frost protection/drainage in that area. And then the well contractor. Everything. So you can see the quandary of new/remodel construction or just hanging a price tag on it and buying another completed place. I not too keen taking on a long term project at this stage of age/retirement.
This vid is pretty good. I've seen a camp done this way. It might help your decision, either way... it's a lot of work.
