Adding to the Wood Pile - Do's and Don't for what you can/should burn

We did a massive clean up at the Cottage this past weekend. I borrowed my brother-in-laws trailer, and it is a big one - it can hold a 4 x 8 sheet of plywood flat in the bed! We made five trips to the local civic dump, and each load was overflowing.

It is amazing how much construction waste accumulated over the summer. Anyway my wife is a bit of a neat freak and we spent the entire day on Saturday either loading the trailer with waste or stacking materials we were storing for later use.

The picture is actually of our firewood pile but it is obscured by the wood construction waste that we have piled in front of it for future use. That means sometime next year I am chopping up and otherwise stacking it in the firewood pile. Ignoring the BBQ and the wheelbarrow you should be able to just see a number of pallets, and a pile of cut ends of the framing lumber.

The plan is to build a firewood shed next spring to keep all this and more firewood out of the weather and drying nicely. We have a wood stove and plenty of firewood still standing on the lot so that is likely to be one of those never ending tasks...

Back to the Garbage Issue:
As I mentioned we took five loads to the dump. We took a load of roof single waste, drywall waste, siding waste, lots of cardboard waste - most of it dreadfully wet, and piles of end cuts of pressure-treated wood and plywood. We carefully sorted all these materials because on arrival at the dump we were instructed to place each in a separate pile.

The day started out as a wet one, as it near poured rain in the morning. Fortunately it cleared up in the afternoon and the sun actually came out. It was at first miserable work but turned out to be a nice day - doubly so as the Cottage lot became preceptively clean and tidy.

We are now set for winter, with the construction waste gone and the remainder of our construction materials neatly stacked and covered for the winter.

There are a few tips for keeping and storing at the dump - the bottom line is burn only safe materals:

Do Not burn any of the following:
  • Pressure-treated wood
  • Plywood, or for that matter any engineered wood products
  • Plastic, Styrofoam
All of these materials give off toxic gases and they can damage your wood stove.

Related Posts:
Installing the Wood stove Chimney
;-)