Cascade of stuff
After burning the first
of what I suspect will be several piles of flammable debris, I wish I'd
caught on to the value of fire earlier. Because Mark and I are both
seeing how our early actions on the farm started the cascade of STUFF
that eventually took over the barn, and one of those actions was
putting away not-very-good lumber/furniture for later use.
While it's great to have
a stash of two-by-fours and other quality building supplies on hand,
odd-shaped debris and ancient particle-board furniture that came with
the trailer really should have been burned a decade ago. Live and
learn! I suspect we won't make the same mistakes in our new place.
(We'll be sure to make new mistakes instead.)
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Your cleaning is a good motivation for me, with a dirt-floor basement and wood I've saved, some of it for nostalgic reasons --also because my basement is only accessible from the outside. Likewise my father saved finished wood pieces, inherited from his father's framing business. And at our summer camp, there were boards of all kinds, shoved under the house, some as "special" boards for repairing homemade wooden boats two of which were being stored out back, too long to move, and too beautiful to take apart, themselves storage area for wasps...
Storing a few rough hewn, oak tobacco sticks was madness, since I would not be using them. The best-case scenario for such wood is to photo it, but when there is too much of it, if your hobby is not woodworking, better to dispose of it.
The problem with having a water-tight storage area is that it then becomes a veritable "lumber-room" which used to be the attic storage area in big old houses.