New wood shed, and how do you rotate stored firewood?

[s219]

Yep.....Woodmizer owner since 1991. Problem with cheap lumber is it just encourages you to find ways to use it. Seriously, if you have timber on your place, or access to it, a small bandmill is one of the best tools you'll ever buy.

We're fortunate to have 70ac of mostly hardwoods (pine beetle killed off most of our pines in the late 90's, and I built rental houses out of the lumber....another story), so I have a lot of dead/dying stuff to select from, as well as stuff that just needs to come down to thin our woods.

I don't burn any poplar.....if it's large enough, I saw it for lumber, otherwise I burn it in with brush, or simply ignore it. Not really a big fan of red maple either for firewood. We have a lot of chestnut oak that never amounts to much for saw timber, but makes pretty good firewood, so lot of mine is that.

I have 8 acres which is probably 80% Loblolly that was planted in the mid 1990s and needs thinning. Not enough timber to make it worth the time of a pro logger (unless I could convince many neighbors to harvest their timber together). So I thin little by little as I have time, and it could keep me busy for life I think. The trees are planted about 8' apart so there are zillions of them on 8 acres.

I think a WoodMizer would be great to have -- could probably pay for it just by cutting hardwood slabs and boards for local woodworkers and builders. I don't know how good the Loblolly pine is for structural lumber. My offhand impression is that it's fairly strong grain, given the behavior of the hinge and holding wood I have seen when felling trees -- it will fold over the whole way before pulling apart. I have milled a few pines with my Alaskan mill and it is pretty wood to use for projects, siding, etc. It grows so fast the grain is very wide, so not high quality lumber but very pretty patterns. Most people around here consider it pulp wood only. It does OK for kindling and campfire wood if thoroughly seasoned, but I'll never use up 8 acres worth that way.... So if I could get a benefit out of milling the Loblolly it would result in a lot of wood.

We have a fair amount of red maple which doesn't do well on this land for some reason. At about 15-20 years of age, all the maples rot and hollow out from the bottom. I cut 2-3 of those every winter for firewood mainly because I know the trees won't be good for anything else if I wait longer. As it is, it's a pain to go to the trouble of felling a large tree and then only get about 60-70% of the wood out of it since the rest is rotten.

The oaks and beeches are generally healthy, although the beeches also like to hollow out from the bottom (just on a much slower time scale than the maples, and it doesn't seem to harm the beeches survivability -- seen some 100+ year old beeches with a big cavern on the bottom that look totally happy). Gums do well too, and burn fine, but are of course a pain to split. Most of the oaks are large grand trees and beautiful to look at, so I only take the ones that have rot or beaver damage, and generally that's just a few a year. The oaks that rot all seem to rot from the top down.

Also have a lot of bald cypress (beautiful white and tight grain) that I leave alone for the most part, and assorted other species in low numbers. I wish I had more walnut, hickory, and locust but have very few -- I can count those one one hand.

 

[EddieWalker]

From the basement stack, the wood gets loaded on a dumb waiter car I built that holds 3-5 days worth of wood for the primary stove in the living room on the first floor. Electric winch raises the car, sliding door in the fireplace front accesses the wood for the living room stove.

I'm in the process of rethinking where I store my firewood and considering my options. My favorite idea is to have it in the garage, or at least a weeks worth of wood in the garage. Have you had any bug issues or snakes come out of the wood?

 

[deezler]

I'm in the process of rethinking where I store my firewood and considering my options. My favorite idea is to have it in the garage, or at least a weeks worth of wood in the garage. Have you had any bug issues or snakes come out of the wood?

Bugs are what scare me from keeping wood in the house, so mine stays on the porch right outside the french doors beside the wood stove.

Doubt any snakes could sneak in undetected if you are hand loading and piling the wood in like that. Snakes go underground all winter long up here in the northern states anyway. I do get a lot of mouse nests in my wood piles when they are out near the woods, however. I always feel kinda bad to toss a mouse family out into the snow when I need to move some firewood over to the house. Hopefully some critter gets a good snack.... maybe that explains the abundance of owl hoots I hear every evening.

 

[TnAndy]

s219,

Having cypress, I take it you're in the tidewater area of Virginia, so the trees you mention fit that area.

We are in the Appalachian Mtns, our pines are eastern white, a short leaf (some call 'slash pine') that isn't much good for anything, the occasional long leaf, close to the true Southern yellow pine, and hemlock. Very few pines of any size left on our place due to that beetle infestation of the 90's....most are young ones coming back, but they won't make saw timber in my lifetime.

Have a LOT of second/third growth yellow poplar here now....that is my 'go to' species for framing since the white pine was decimated. Pile of logs that came off a 1/2 hillside above the mill yard I later turned into an apple orchard.

Logging out dying white pines in the 90's:

Stack of 2x8's that later went in a rental house:

Cut a lightening struck poplar the other day, got 4 decent 12' saw logs out of it. Cut 100 2x4x12' out of it:

 

[TnAndy]

I'm in the process of rethinking where I store my firewood and considering my options. My favorite idea is to have it in the garage, or at least a weeks worth of wood in the garage. Have you had any bug issues or snakes come out of the wood?

Never had a snake inside. Did stack it just outside the basement door once many years ago, and wife hollers "SNAKE" one day. Says she saw rattlesnake go under the pile. I stuck a shotgun in the pile, cranked a couple rounds off to make her happy, thinking "no way I hit anything", but when we unstacked it that winter, a mummified rattlesnake lay under it ! Concussion kill is my guess.

Bugs we do get some, but not a huge issue.

 

[shooterdon]

Think long term. I need to keep the amount of handling down to a minimum as I am in my late 60's. I will no longer stack wood over and over again or handle split wood multiple times. I used to load split wood into the Ranger or pickup, then stack in a pile, and then stack it into the Ranger or pickup to move to the garage, and stack it again....grr! Each piece stacked 4 times before putting it into the log carrier to the house.

My current plan.

My tractor is limited in lifting capacity so I will be using cut down pallets as shown below., I built one this fall to test the concept and it works well and is cheap. It holds 1/3 of a cord with 5 ft tall sides I cannot lift it with the FEL/forks but can lift if with a carry all on the 3 pt.

How to make Portable Firewood Pallet Racks - YouTube

I use 5 cords a year so will need 15 units to store 1 year of wood. Each unit requires 11 sq ft of ground space. 165 sq ft of covered area. A 20x21x9 steel carport will cost $2000 installed. It will hold over two years of wood.

http://allsteelcarports.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/MI-Region-CARPORT.pdf

Wood will go from the splitter into the cut down pallet as it is split. These pallets will be moved to the carport for seasoning. In the fall and during the winter, pallets from the carport are move to the attached garage as needed. A pallet jack is used to move the pallets coming off the tractor and stage them in the garage. 6 pallets in the garage will require 66 sq ft of space and hold 2 cords of wood.

Stacking wood is the most useless activity in the process of using firewood, and it cannot be mechanized, so I am trying to minimize it.

Putting wood on pallets also allows me to easily stage wood in the carport. Wood left over from the previous year is not buried behind newer wood being processed. I can work off the east side of carport one year and the west side the next. Wood left over from the east side can be easily pulled out and stacked in front of the new firewood when processing is done.

 

[KennyG]

Interesting idea, and I could try that on the second bay which I am about to start filling. Do you have any tricks for the criss-cross crib-stacking on the ends? I never seemed to have much luck with those staying put. Seems like once the wood started seasoning and shrank, they'd get all wobbly and let go.

As I noted, I did have a collapse when I first started using this shed. The photo I posted is quite old. Now I cross the exposed end of each layer. I try to select pieces to keep it level when I cross and it seems to work pretty well. Most of my wood comes from dead or downed oak and ash and it doesn't seem to shrink too much.

 

[ericm979]

An IBC tote cage holds a little over 1/3 of a cord. In some areas of the country they can be had for signficantly less than it'd cost to buy the lumber to make your own.
Watch out for totes that contain remnants of toxic chemicals and for cages that have been damaged underneath by ham fisted forklift operators.

 

[Oaktree]

Anyhow, that brings me to my question -- those of you with wood sheds, how do you manage seasoned wood and green wood and rotate your supply? I am so used to working with single 1/3 cord stacks out in the open that I am left scratching my head at the best way to rotate supply in a shed where you're stacking several rows deep.

Most of the easily accessible hardwood on my property is relatively new growth (the PO had it logged some time in the 90s), so I end up buying grapple loads, which last me ~3yr plus whatever I can scavenge. I cut, split and stack the green wood in an open area a couple hundred yards from the house/woodshed where it's out of the way (and the bark/sawdust stays down there). Let it sit 2 or 3 years tarped and just fill the woodshed from those stacks in the fall.

As far as rotation in the woodshed itself, unless the previous year was unusually mild, we use probably 90% of what's in the shed over the winter...easy enough to shuffle what's left to the front when refilling the shed. I also try to sort it somewhat so the smaller pieces are toward the front or back (spring/fall wood), and the big chunks in the middle for Jan/Feb cold weather. Most of the odd stuff (notches, end pieces, stuff that had to be diced up with a chainsaw gets used in the fall.

All stacked on pallets both in the green wood area and inside the woodshed.

 

[Tractor Seabee]

After Christmas, I got to looking at all my firewood stacks and decided to build a wood shed to try and consolidate and neaten things up in the future. I did a lot of research on the internet looking at designs and what other folks had done, and ended up going with a pole barn structure. All the designs I saw that integrated a raised floor into the structure had issues with sagging, and trying to support the weight of the firewood on the footings of the poles was really not practical anyhow (the weight of the wood far exceeded snow loads we normally design footings for). So I ended up doing a pallet-style floor that sits inside the pole barn structure but floats independent of it. It's supported by a base of compacted crushed gravel. I doubt it will settle, but if it does it won't impact the pole barn.

I made the structure 6' x 16' with 12" overhang all around (so roof is 8' x 18'). The roof has a 3:12 pitch and uses 5V metal. I can put three stacks of wood in the 6' depth with about 5-6" air space between the stacks. All together, this will hold about 2.5-3 cords of wood. If the shed works out well, I will build another one next year and another the year after, eventually replacing my separate stacks with three sheds.

Here's the basic pole barn structure:

View attachment 588208

Then gravel base added, as well as side slats:

View attachment 588207

Finally, with pallet-style floor (floats independent of the poles):

View attachment 588206

One thing I fussed over was how to divide the wood storage up so that I could work into a stack front to back and free up space for reloading. I season my wood for two years. Typically, we begin burning firewood in November, when I transfer seasoned wood to our front porch 1/3 cord at a time. Then I start reloading the newly-empty stacks with green wood (for use two years later) in January and February. So in the November-January timeframe, I want to start freeing up stacks for reloading.

What I ended up doing is making several "book end" style dividers that I can put in the wood shed and use to divide up a stack into 4' wide sections. With a divider on each stack, I can clear out a 4' section, front to back, and make it available for reloading. Not sure this is the best solution, but time will tell. Since the dividers are not fixed in place, I can move them out of the way when working front to back and only set them in place as needed to reload.

View attachment 588210

View attachment 588209

Finally got the first side filled up today, that's about 1.3-1.5 cords.

View attachment 588211

Already, I am wishing I made this a three-bay shed, which might have helped me manage inventory and reloading better on a two year seasoning schedule. With three bays, I could have a bay for this year (burn now), next year (burn in 1 year), and green wood (burn in 2 years) and not have to fiddle with freeing up space to reload wood. That would leave one of the bays empty over the summer, but I'm sure I could find a use for that.

Anyhow, that brings me to my question -- those of you with wood sheds, how do you manage seasoned wood and green wood and rotate your supply? I am so used to working with single 1/3 cord stacks out in the open that I am left scratching my head at the best way to rotate supply in a shed where you're stacking several rows deep.

Arrange your stacking so you can always use the first in/first out principle. If there is only one access point you will probably lose some space to circulation. Two opening ends solves that.

Ron