Storing Firewood in the Basement for Winter
If you burn wood you know that there’s nothing worse than having to go outside in the snow to get more. No matter how well you cover your wood pile the wood is always frozen together, then you have to haul it through the snow to the house, and then once you get it inside it needs to thaw and dry off.
We avoid this unpleasant task by storing our wood in our basement. It’s always clean, dry, and ready to go when we need it- no boots required.
Benefits of Storing Your Firewood Indoors
Look at those checks on the end! Perfectly dried for clean burning.
Dry wood burns cleaner and more efficiently than wet wood, which means you get more heat and your chimney stays cleaner. By storing wood in a dry, protected place like a basement, we’re keeping our wood in ideal condition for burning.
It’s also really convenient. The last thing anyone wants to do in the winter is haul in a bunch of wet frozen firewood. Instead of having to get bundled up, shovel a path, and then break out the sled or the gator, we can just carry a tote down to the basement in our slippers every time we need more wood.
How We Store Our Wood Indoors
We let our firewood fully season outdoors before bringing it in. Ideally, once we split it we let it sit, stacked and covered, for about a year. The wood should be nice and dry and ready to go before you bring it in.
Generally, we wait until late fall to bring in our wood, usually October. You want a couple good hard frosts to kill any bugs that might be living in the woodpile. We also try to get it in before the weather turns wet. Pushing a wheelbarrow full of wood is a lot harder when the yard is mud.
The firewood gets stacked in our dry basement on a good concrete floor. We used to build ends (like we do outside) but for ease and stability now we stack between two end walls. Not having to stack towers saves us a significant amount of time and effort building the puzzle, and we can be sure that the 6 foot tall pile won’t fall down.
There are a lot of creative ways that people bring their firewood inside. We built a ramp into the basement and bring the wood in by the wheelbarrow full. It’s so much easier than carrying it downstairs a few sticks at a time.
Want to Learn More?
Watch the video below, Bringing a Cord of Wood into my Basement, where Andy explains all about why we store our wood like we do and you can see our basement wood storage in action.
