DIY firewood stand

There is SO MUCH to do on my Fridays off. And there's only 12 of them, so I better get cracking. Last week, I spent the day draining our landscaping pond to be able to get rid of it, and did a lot of pruning and upkeep on the bushes around the firepit. That left me with a lot of yard waste to clean, and as it turns out, I could throw together a project to help deal with that.

Another thing I wanted to do on one of these days was re-do the patio bench from last summer. It's been in the shop for the past few days and I pried off the two worst-looking boards, and they should make for some nice scrap to put together a place to store all this potential firewood.

This bench needs a lot of love.

But it does leave me with some good scrap to use

This needs to be dry at the bottom though, so before I put a frame down I'm going to re-use the stones that were surrounding the pond. Some of them are becoming a footpath through the landscaping to our spigot, and some are becoming my dry spot for the firewood rack I'm about to throw together. Always better to reuse vs throw out.

With two 6-foot boards to use, I thought a simple U-shape would work, with two U's attached with a bunch of shorter pieces cut off. I thought six would do it, so I started by chopping three small pieces off the end of each board.

Improvised a quick stopper jig with a small clamp

Cuts: two bottoms, four sides, six spacers

Then the remaining boards got cut into three sections, two 19" pieces which left one a little longer for a bottom. I made the first U with kreg screws, set that on its side to attach the spacers, then flipped that to attach the other U. This came together super fast.

Good kreg project

All together

The boards were pressure treated to begin with, and already had some stain and poly on them, so at that point it was ready to go out and hold the firewood. Turns out I had made way more fire fuel than I thought, so I filled it up pretty quickly without even chopping up a few of the remaining big branches.

Good day to work outside too, get out of the shop.

There is still a lot to do back here, but trust me when I say it's so much cleaner looking just with all the branches and wood organized. Going with scrap kind of limited me as far as how big I could make a stand like this, but I didn't want a huge one dominating the space anyway. This is just about perfect for what I needed. Now I just have to fill the hole the pond left, and have some bonfires to use up some of this firewood.