To ensure you’re ready for plenty of great fires once the summer has passed, you need to properly store your stock of firewood throughout the season. Below, we’ll walk you through some simple tips on how to store firewood in summer to streamline and optimize the process.

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Two Main Enemies

At first, storing wood might seem like an easy task. After all, trees grow outside, so isn’t wood perfectly suited to simply live out in the elements until you’re ready to burn it? Not quite.

You’ll need dry wood if you want to build a great fire, so there are some important details to consider to achieve this while in storage. Also, you want to make sure your woodpile doesn’t cause other issues in regards to your property.

When it comes to summer wood storage, there are two main enemies to confront:

Insects and Rodents

Simply put, piles of firewood are a strong attractant for insects and rodents. If you have wood piled up in an area near your home, don’t be surprised to find spiders, mice, and many other critters exploring the stack.

With that in mind, make it a point not to pile up your wood too close to your house. It might seem convenient to place your wood right outside the back door, for example, but doing so is going to bring all of those little critters near your home. If at all possible, keep your stack away from the house so you can reduce the chance of unwanted guests coming inside.

Moisture from the Ground

In most climates, the summer months aren’t going to provide a lot of moisture from above. Sure, there might be an occasional rainstorm, but there will likely be plenty of dry days in between. However, there is always moisture in the ground, and water coming up from the ground can cause the bottom of your stack to become soggy and maybe even moldy. Later in this article, we’ll talk about how to address this problem successfully.

The strategy you use to store your firewood should address both of the issues above. With the right plan, you can keep moisture away from your wood and make it less likely that unwanted critters will want to build their home in the pile.

The Right Way to Cover Firewood

It seems pretty obvious that covering firewood is a good idea. Keeping rain off the top of your stack is a good start, but that’s not the end of the job. Remember, much of the moisture that you need to worry about is going to come from below, not above.

First, don’t store your firewood under a tightly wrapped tarp. That tarp will serve as a trap for any moisture that’s in the stack, and the wood will struggle to dry out. Instead, you want to cover firewood loosely, so rain is blocked but the wood still has room to breathe.

The ideal solution here is a metal storage shed that will provide a roof but also plenty of space around the wood for air to move freely. It would be even better if that shed had a large door or a couple of windows for plenty of ventilation on nice days.

Strategic Stacking

You’ll need to stack your firewood in an orderly fashion before it’s stored for the summer. Good stacking will help the wood dry out more thoroughly, and it will also make it easier to retrieve pieces when winter arrives.

Here are two key tips for proper wood stacking:

• Stay off the ground. Consider using something like pallets or long 2x4s to create a small platform for your woodpile. This will get the bottom row off the ground and offer better circulation for your entire stack.
• Big on the bottom. Sort your pieces of firewood by size and place the largest pieces on the bottom row. The pieces should get smaller and smaller as you move up the stack, so you end up with a solid structure that isn’t likely to tip over.

There’s a bit of an art to stacking firewood correctly, but you should get better at it in time. As long as the bottom row is made up of big pieces, and is kept off the ground, you should be in good shape.

Work with American Steel Carports, Inc.

It’s important to know how to store firewood in summer. Remember, having a small shed on your property that’s dedicated to firewood storage will make your life a little bit easier in both the summer and the winter. And, by shopping at American Steel Carports, Inc., you can get a durable metal shed for an affordable price. Ready to create your new structure? Use our Build & Price Tool to get started!