Light Duty Tasks

A minor back injury (I can still walk) has kept me off the main task of repairing the rotted sill along the front of the house.  With the cold weather approaching, the inability to take care of that and other physically intensive tasks like stacking firewood and doing some minor roof repairs makes one appreciate the predicament that early-American homesteaders would find themselves when a similar injury would lay them up.  At least we still have the oil furnace as a backup.

Although I can't crawl around on my hands and knees with a sawzall to carve away at the sill, there are a few light-duty tasks I've been able to get to in the meantime.

I recently ordered set of brackets for making a firewood rack.  For the past couple of winters I've stacked wood on discarded shipping pallets and other pieces of scraps.  This worked alright except it meant either creating some end post or using a criss-cross method of stacking the ends of the wood pile so that it was self-supporting.

Our wood stove has a small firebox which requires the wood to be no more than 16" long. I found it wasn't easy to stack wood this narrow in free-standing rows without being very deliberate about the process.  Stacking wood isn't something that I really care to be that deliberate about so I've turned to these wood racks as a solution.

A set of brackets combined with some 8 foot pressure treated 2x4s will hold about 1/2 a cord.  If this works well, I'll build some more racks to help with my firewood frustrations.

The light task of putting these together kept me busy long enough to feel the weekend wasn't a total loss, and also gave me the pleasure of using the old handsaw again.

handyman