Friday 23 December 2011

Building a firewood store: part 3

A while ago I posted pictures of the construction of our firewood store (part 1 and part 2), but we've made one more small addition to it.

We found that although rain dripping off the lower edge of the roof was well clear of the wood stored inside, the splashes when the drips landed were making the wood wet. So, we've added a gutter, suspended from the roof slats by short lengths of paracord:

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We may add something to collect the rainwater from it later, but at present we're getting more than enough from the house roof.

We then went up to the wood to do the same to the shelter that EWB had built for us back in March, but this time we definitely wanted to harvest the rainwater so we can use it for the fruit trees in the summer. So, we got hold of a couple of old dustbins from Freecycle, and cut a hole in the lid:

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and then fitted in the downpipe. We wanted a lid on to prevent wildlife falling in and drowning.

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While we were up there, we also stripped off the plastic from roof of our old firewood shelter, as it was degrading from UV exposure, and replaced it with a tarpaulin and some old corrugated plastic we had spare. We'll do something more permanent with roof felt later I think, but this is an improvement for now:

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and finally, we went for a bike ride (in the drizzle) this morning to try and video some herons down near Military Road. We didn't see any herons, but we did get a nice video of some swans feeding:


Mike

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