I handle my wood at least four times before it gets in the house. Drives me crazy. I had a thought to build a couple dozen half-rick containers using four wooden pallets (bottom, sides, back) with a 2x4 brace across the top front. Load these right in the woodlot, stack in the shed, and fork 'em in the garage as needed. I've got alot of old pallets and I'm going to try it this winter as I cut for next year.
We are busy "building" our SE Iowa retirement "farm" out of a very old farmstead. We are long term thinkers so we've provided for the handling of firewood even though we don't have the wood-burning stove yet. When we built a two-spot attached garage, we had the concrete guys build a sort of "loading dock" in the back which will be the storage area for the moveable firewood ricks that we will have when we get into wood burning. The ricks will look like Okie G's except for casters on the bottom and a LIFTING EYE. We'll have RICK TRAILERS which we load in the field or the wood lot as the wood is split. The ricks can stay on the trailers which will be backed into a shed until the ricks are needed on the loading dock. We'll only touch the wood pieces twice.......when we load the rick, and when we take the pieces into the house. We already have ONE piece to the wood puzzle and that is a capable tractor. Our 1952 vintage JD Model A has a front end loader to handle the ricks with a hook, and a nice PTO to run the mega-splitter we will be building in the nice shop we are making out of our grainery. I grew up heating with firewood so I KNOW what a labor-intensive process it can be if you aren't set up for it.
Playing on this idea the past weekend I realized I'll need a dolly of sorts also.. my tractor won't quite vertically clear the garage door to set the container where I want it. Bother.
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