relationship status with 'wood'?

it's complicated...

I love brand spanikin’ new dimensional lumber.

Well,

I love all lumber really.

That’s not entirely true either.

Ok. I love wood.

Hardwood, softwood, wetwood or tinder dry, I get excited at the sight of a nice long log.

I even made a currently unused Instagram page that I might want to revisit because I love wood so much.

Like any love, I have a complicated relationship with wood.

I long to spend more time in the woods, cutting wood, harvesting wood for building and burning.

I love collecting and curing and stacking and piling and moving and restacking and moving and restacking my wood just enough to cause an exotic dancer to blush.

Nothing feels better than stacking and restacking my wood…

I’m currently in the throes of wood complexity.

The chickens are getting another coop upgrade. I could have a life - if I spent a little less time crafting avian paradises for my hens.

Well into the upgrade process, I figured out how I’d make a permanent roof for the girls.

Initially I was starting with a box built on top of the posts that hold up the wire around my shit pile.

Well, there’s a lot of composted food there too, but mostly?

It’s a shit pile. Sourced from the arse end of the horses I hang with, my shit pile is small but mighty. It’s teeming with worms and as such is a rich source of protein for the lay dees.

I’ve mostly been using scraps of wood that I’ve had hanging around for years.

I love doing this. I love these boards. Each I associate with a different event or renovation.

Each board has a story that I never get bored of telling myself.

Assembling them I think I get the same satisfaction that Laura gets when she pieces together a quilt.

The seems and the stitching are what makes things interesting.

Anyway, back to the shitpile.

The shitpile that serves as a basis for the bird box isn’t a square. It’s not a triangle or circle neither.

It’s all kinds of wrong in all sorts of weird and wacky ways.

I was going to have angles and roof patches going every which way.

I couldn’t get past what to do next.

I guess that’s what happens when you build a chicken coop outta trash on top of a shit pile.

And tomorrow?

I’ll tell y’all about what I love most about standard lumber and making things square.