3-cord Woodshed

After six years of my standard woodpile tarps being torn by high winds, I decided I needed a better, sturdier structure for protecting my firewood from the elements. I had many nights lying in bed, hearing the wind whipping the tarps around on my woodpiles. I tried tying the tarps down using twine instead of laying wood and rock on top of the piles, but the tarps tore much faster than they had at my childhood home which is much less exposed to the wind. Listening to the rain in November is awful when I know my wood is lying exposed, but listening to the rain ping off the metal roof of my wood shed is reassuring. It lets me fall back asleep!

This is a 3-cord woodshed. I bought the plans for it off Etsy and modified it only slightly. I found that it holds 3 cords if you cram the woodpiles in the shed, but I prefer to leave at least a few inches between piles to let fresh air blow through and carry moisture away. Stacking to the roof with about 5 inches between piles, the shed holds about 2.4 cords. One nice benefit I hadn't thought about: it's much faster to stack in a shed because there are more supporting structures (beams, walls) that help keep your piles straight. As a finishing touch, I etched Robert Frost's poem "The Wood-Pile" on the side of the shed. This was one of the first poems that really gave me an appreciation for poetry: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44276/the-wood-pile I got a lot of help from my dad on this project -- Thanks Dad!

Building a woodshed is satisfying not only when I'm building it, but also after a big rainstorm and I can see my wood sitting in it, still happy and dry. Getting posts to be orthogonal to the deck they're rising from is difficult.