Got wood?

If you are a guy of a certain age, chances are you have a private stash of wood. Perhaps it is stacked neatly in the corner of your garage workshop area. Or maybe it is squirreled away in the rafters of your backyard shed or slid underneath the camper that you haven’t used in a several years since your children got too old to want to enjoy spending time with their dad without cell service or air conditioning feeding mosquitoes and smelling like campfire and damp socks in the woods.

Regardless of where you have it, there is a good bet you have your private stash of wood somewhere. In our first home, I kept my wood safe and dry in our damp basement by sliding it up between the floor joists of the main floor.

My wife eventually found me out, and as all wives seem to do, she objected to my wood stash.

It would be incorrect to refer to it as a wood pile. That implies that it is no better than firewood and could be readily discarded.

Making broad generalizations, especially when it comes to gender behaviors and roles, is always an inherently risky proposition. But I will hold my ground when it comes to guys and their wood.

You see, when you do any projects around the house, you may end up with exactly the amount of materials you needed. I would argue that if you ended a project with just enough wood, you didn’t have enough to begin with. You need a wood cushion, for when you inevitably needed to cut four or five times because you missed the part about measuring twice to begin with.

Likewise, when doing some household repair or renovation project, there is a good chance you will come across a fine section of 2x4 or other dimensional lumber that is in too good of shape to simply toss in a burn pile or throw away. Who knows when you will need a 23-inch piece of 2x6 or a random deck board?

It would be awful to have to halt a project because you were one deck board short or have to go buy a full 8-foot piece of dimensional lumber when you needed something 19.5 inches long.

It may not even be for you. You could have a buddy, or questionable son-in-law who started a project without thinking through his wood needs. Or perhaps it is helping out at an activity and needing to create a stake to hold a sign, or alternatively to dispatch a pesky vampire.

Wood stashes exist for times like that. When a horde of vampires comes creeping in the community some winter night, it will be the guys with stashes of wood who will be the ones prepared to protect their families.

Unfortunately, guys exist in a constant state of having to defend our wood from those who see it as clutter, a home for vermin, or as useless a pile of junk as that brother-in-law who only shows up to drink your beer and ask for money for some new get-rich-quick scheme.

I suspect there is something about women who have been married for a while that makes them not like their husband’s wood. As much as guys are driven to maintain stashes of wood, the women in our lives are equally driven to be bothered by said wood and call on us to get rid of it, claiming that we will never use it.

Well, yeah, just because there haven’t been any vampire attacks in Medford, doesn’t mean there won’t be.

As the guy who sends me scary letters about the quality of my retirement account reminds me past results are no guarantee of future performance. Just because we haven’t needed to barricade our windows and doors against a zombie horde, doesn’t mean we won’t have to in the future and I, for one, aim to be prepared.

Zombie and vampire apocalypses aside, I did get a special thrill last weekend, when I utilized a portion of my wood stash to build a weight-corral to keep the new set concrete and PVC pipe weights from rolling around in the back of my utility trailer.

Admittedly, the job of designing and building the corral, which fits across the front of my trailer, would have been faster and easier and a far prettier finished product, if I had broken down and gone to Klingbeil’s rather than doggedly insisting on using reclaimed wood from planter that I demolished, but there a certain principle to demonstrating that my old wood came in handy after all.

Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News. Contact Brian at BrianWilson@centralwinews.com.