Woodshed Modification

Long, long ago, and actually rather far away from the foothills of central Maine, before we had children, we used to live aboard our sailboat. Every so often Whit would get the urge to make a hole in it and install a decklight, or a new through-hull for something. Regardless of what it was, I always felt very insecure when he pulled out his hole saw. Making holes in a boat while it is sitting in the water always seemed kind of risky to me (Yeah, yeah, it was in the deck or above the waterline...that's not the point! It made me feel insecure, okay?) Not only that, I always wondered if he was changing the integrity of the hull or something every time he made a new hole. It drove me crazy.

Twenty-five years later Whit is no longer working with weenie hole saws. No, now he uses a Sawzall which will cut through just about anything...wood beams, angle iron, you name it, I think he's cut it. It came in really handy when he was renovating this old farmhouse. I am no longer nervous when Whit pulls out his saw. For starters, you can't sink a house by making a hole in it. Secondly, he's pretty darned good at making things look better after he's used his Sawzall. : )

Last winter we had a lot of snow. A real lot. But we didn't know that yet in January. We hadn't dragged in all of our wood for the winter yet. It was still out in our side lot, so we hooked up Scooby one day and spent a few hours retrieving wood from the pile out there. The only problem with this is that we have to travel from the lot on the north side of the house around to the door to the woodshed in the dooryard on the south side of the house.

This is the north side of the house. The white section in front of the horses is our woodshed, but there's no door there.

So we had to drive around the front of the house to get to the door on the south side of the house.

On one of our slow, drizzly weeks, when we couldn't be out cutting hay, Whit decided to pull out his Sawzall and modify the shed a bit.

I had to check it out from the outside. Whit is cutting around the wind brace. We need that.

It does look like a hole in the wall now, but later he will make a cool sliding barn-type door for it. Before it snows. Meanwhile, we have a quicker way of getting the wood into the shed, and the added bonus of a little more light in there.

The woodshed has a dirt floor on which Whit laid stone. He's raking it even before he lays the pallets down again to keep the wood up off of the ground. (It stays drier with the air circulating under it.)

Ta da. It looks a lot neater, plus I like the easy access to my garden without having to walk through my laundry room with yucky boots on.