Preparing for Next Winter (Already)

Last summer I decided to do away with trudging through the snow and wet to access our stash of wood pellets. I cut a new hole in the screen and wall at one end of our porch, then closed in the other sides of that end to make a pellet shed. Later we filled it with two and a half tons of pellets, stacked to the ceiling. I discovered the following syllogism by experience: A: Two and a half tons is a lot of weight. B: When you cut out a third of the length of a wall which is half screen already, it can't bear much weight. A + B = a buckled wall in my pellet shed. In this shot you can see the interior wall (with pale ends where I sawed through it), pushed out toward the porch from a winter of serious pressure: Now the shed is empty (we'll use the last bag of pellets tomorrow), so I've thrown up some 2x4s for vertical support. (By the way, these are still home-cut boards from the summer of 2009. Those hemlocks went a long way!)

With the added support, I hope that next autumn I won't have three tons of pellets come crashing into the porch (which at times I feared last year).

I need to paint the boards to match the brown and green motif of the house before we get next year's three tons. The pressure is on: in order to get the best price on pellets ($199 per ton again this year) we need to order them this month.

~emrys