Kind of a dumb question about wood sheds

Open sides and a top is great. Nothing wrong with sitting out though...

More open to air & sun = faster drying. Sure you can put it in the shed, but it will dry slower than if in the open. Also depends on where the shed is.
And depends on how tight you stack it.

From my experience it will still dry if you place it directly in the shed with open sides but not as fast as if it was placed in full sun. I would add a few months to the drying time for hardwoods.

Let it sit outside to season (preferably at least a year CSS ) and put it in the shed the.season before you burn. Lots of great sheds on this site, do a search you'll see what I mean!!

The biggest problem with trying to season (dry) wood in a shed (assuming you have open sides) is the shape of the shed. If you have a large squareish shed you are going to have rows of wood trapped in between other rows of wood. The outside rows may get plenty of wind exposure, but the rows of wood in the middle will not get wind (or sun) exposure and of course won't dry properly.
Actually if you built your shed long and narrow (only two rows deep) and open on all sides the wood would dry faster than wood left out in the open because it would get just as much air exposure as wood left in the open, plus it would (almost) never get wet in the rain. This would be especially important in very wet climates.
Do you already have a woodshed?

I re-read your post and it sounds like you are planning to build a shed. If you really want to put your wood directly into a woodshed, then keep the long narrow woodshed idea in mind. It does take a little bit more materials when building a shed like that, but not that much.
One nice advantage you gain by putting your wood directly into a shed is you don't have to move it so much. Once you split it you can stack it directly into the shed and forget about it until you're ready to burn it.
Keep in mind that if you plan on trying to get 3 years ahead with your wood supply and you want to keep all of it in a woodshed, and you build the shed only two rows deep, and you go through an average of 3 cords a year, you'll probably need a wood shed somewhere around 72ft long.

If you listen to most people the preferred method would be to keep your newly split wood in the sun for a year to properly season If you go through 4 plus cords a year than that is a lot of wood to store outside. The reason I built the shed was to tidy things up just a bit and not have wood everywhere in my yard. I also built it so I would only have to move my wood one time after I split it and than stack it in the shed. My wife tolerates my wood habit a lot better now that everything is in the shed from the beginning. My advice is to place partitions in the shed to section it off. Almost like you would have different bays in a garage. My shed is 16x8x8 and I have it sectioned off into 2 bays. Everything that goes into the shed will have almost 2 years of seasoning before I burn it. I completely finish a bay off for each season without touching the other one. This system works well and I've never had a seasoning problem.

Carbon_Liberator said:

I re-read your post and it sounds like you are planning to build a shed. If you really want to put your wood directly into a woodshed, then keep the long narrow woodshed idea in mind. It does take a little bit more materials when building a shed like that, but not that much.
One nice advantage you gain by putting your wood directly into a shed is you don't have to move it so much. Once you split it you can stack it directly into the shed and forget about it until you're ready to burn it.
Keep in mind that if you plan on trying to get 3 years ahead with your wood supply and you want to keep all of it in a woodshed, and you build the shed only two rows deep, and you go through an average of 3 cords a year, you'll probably need a wood shed somewhere around 72ft long.

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The long, narrow shed design also solves the "first-in, first-out problem".

IMHO. Wood sheds are for looks. I don't have a wood shed and I've never had any issues with my wood being too wet. But I keep 1/3 cord under the eave of my house and 1/8 cord in the house which will get me through most precip events around my area. Rained on wood only takes a couple weeks to dry in windy conditions which is what we have. Plus any amount I have in the house gets super dry real quick since its 85 degrees in my fire room and bone dry.

Don't get me wrong, if I had one I'd use it. Just my way of saying it really doesn't matter.

Hogwildz said:

More open to air & sun = faster drying. Sure you can put it in the shed, but it will dry slower than if in the open. Also depends on where the shed is.
And depends on how tight you stack it.

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Good post but I'll add that is also depends upon what kind of wood you plan on getting.

seeyal8r said:

IMHO. Wood sheds are for looks. I don't have a wood shed and I've never had any issues with my wood being too wet. But I keep 1/3 cord under the eave of my house and 1/8 cord in the house which will get me through most precip events around my area. Rained on wood only takes a couple weeks to dry in windy conditions which is what we have. Plus any amount I have in the house gets super dry real quick since its 85 degrees in my fire room and bone dry.

Don't get me wrong, if I had one I'd use it. Just my way of saying it really doesn't matter.

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seeyal8r can I safely assume that you've never had to smash a foot of snow and ice off the top of your wood-stacks in the middle of the winter before? ;-)

Where I currently live I could probably get away without a woodshed or even covering my wood, though I have had the hassle of dealing with the above problem on occasions. However I have lived in places with wetter climates where if you left your wood out in open stacks it would never dry. They would develop moss on the top and sides in the first year, and after that it would begin to rot from the inside. Woodsheds there are definitely not "just for looks."

A professor once told me that if in doubt, the answer is usually increased surface area. In this case I would also added air movement.

I handle the wood twice - stack outside for a couple of years, move into the woodshed in the fall for easy snow-free winter access.

If I did have a woodshed I would be cording wood directly in there. It's enough work as is to cord it once!

The setup I have now, I pull from the cords that are stacked out in the open. I store about 1/2 cord on my porch which is what I pull wood from for the stove. Yes there is snow and ice on the pile, but since I'm pulling a bunch of wood at a time it's not too much of a pain to make a path with the tractor and knock the majority snow off the top of the pile.
What I put on the porch generally lasts 1.5-2 months.

I don't think it's practical to design a shed for first-in/first-out because the first split will be on the bottom of the stack. Best you can do is several compartments like what carb-lib has. His is first-in/last-out per compartment.

After fighting snow and ice, frozen down tarps, wind blown and shreaded tarps, etc. I am very happy to have a shed. The fact it looks good is just a bonus.

Heres what I did.
I built these racks with pressure treated 2x4's
They are 10' long 6' tall and my splits are 24"
They hold 3/4 of a cord.
They are spaced 30" apart.
I plan on building 3, possibly 4 more to the left.
I just threw 1/2 ply on top and covered with a tarp.
But after I get all of them built I plan on building a lean-too style roof structure over them all.
I also have the same racks along the back of the garage. they only have plywood on top no plastic.
The 3rd pic is of the stuff I was splitting over the winter and just stacked them close to the splitter.
Thats about 3.5 cord.
I may just leave them completely exposed or maybe not, we'll see.
And the final 2 pics are what I've been working on since Nov.

NATE379 said:

If I did have a woodshed I would be cording wood directly in there. It's enough work as is to cord it once!

The setup I have now, I pull from the cords that are stacked out in the open. I store about 1/2 cord on my porch which is what I pull wood from for the stove. Yes there is snow and ice on the pile, but since I'm pulling a bunch of wood at a time it's not too much of a pain to make a path with the tractor and knock the majority snow off the top of the pile.
What I put on the porch generally lasts 1.5-2 months.

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1.5 to 2 months from a 1/2 cord of wood. WOW!

seeyal8r said:

IMHO. Wood sheds are for looks. I don't have a wood shed and I've never had any issues with my wood being too wet. But I keep 1/3 cord under the eave of my house and 1/8 cord in the house which will get me through most precip events around my area. Rained on wood only takes a couple weeks to dry in windy conditions which is what we have. Plus any amount I have in the house gets super dry real quick since its 85 degrees in my fire room and bone dry.

Don't get me wrong, if I had one I'd use it. Just my way of saying it really doesn't matter.

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They do look good . . . but for me the impetus to build a woodshed was to not have to fight with tarps, snow and ice . . .

firefighterjake said:

They do look good . . . but for me the impetus to build a woodshed was to not have to fight with tarps, snow and ice . . .

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+1 and I'll add not having to fight the rain and wind.

Yarzy said:

Guys

I have a question about wood sheds that is fairly basic. Can I order wood and place it directly into a woodshed with open sides or do I need to season it in stacks "outside" and then put it in the wood shed? I plan on getting wood this year for winter of 2013-2014. Also, any good designs for first in/first out plans?

Thanks!

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You need to season it outside first, then put it in the woodshed. A woodshed is to store already seasoned wood and protect it from the weather so you don't have to battle the elements and it always gives you dry, burnable wood for immediate use regardless of the weather. That way, if you have a three-day rainstorm and you need dry wood to burn NOW, its there, ready, willing and able.

Green wood put directly into a woodshed will still season, just slower. At least, that's the theory. But I suppose weather, climate, geographical location, shed design, wood species, etc might cause some variances on that.

Welcome to the forum Jeff. I bet by now they have their answers to 3 year old questions.

Oldman47 said:

Welcome to the forum Jeff. I bet by now they have their answers to 3 year old questions.

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I bet you are right. I saw that too and almost didn't post but then I thought there might be numerous other people who might read that and benefit from the answer regardless of the date of the one person's original post. Otherwise, what's the purpose of a public forum? We could all just email each other privately...

Jeffm1 said:

I bet you are right. I saw that too and almost didn't post but then I thought there might be numerous other people who might read that and benefit from the answer regardless of the date of the one person's original post. Otherwise, what's the purpose of a public forum? We could all just email each other privately...

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The thread will float back down to where you found it. Some of us just like to have a little fun with a resurrected old thread. Float to top is a nice forum feature for days/weeks old threads.
It's Summer. A nice time of year to be working on a shed.