Well folks, having some time off from work has finally given me a chance to do something I have been wanting to do since I moved in here; build a cover for our wood chute.
Anyone who’s ever been to our house and has seen the basement has probably seen the wood stove. We have this little “chute” which is basically a spot between our wood room and the main living room area. You go into the wood room and drop wood into the chute so you can go back into the living room and put it in the stove. It basically serves as a spot for us top pile about 20 logs for us to use with the stove, and we don’t have to go into the wood room to get it. We just take it out of the chute.
The problem is, there’s never been a cover for it and the cold air from that room gets into the house via the chute and the cats like to climb in and play in the wood room.
Today, I finally decided to try and build something. Now let me make this clear, I don’t have any carpentry skills of any kind nor do I own a powersaw or many tools to begin with. But I do have some creative ideas so today I put those to work.
Underside of the wood door
Having worked in a box factory for almost five years, I got to know how versatile corrugated (cardboard) can be. I had cut up the boxes from our TV’s we got and had a few pieces left over and I wondered if I could shape them into something that would work as a cover. Well, it worked wonderfully.
What you see in this photo is the underside of the cover. I took two pieces of 29″x16″ corrugated sheets and put a piece of leftover panelling in between them. I also then cut strips of the board to fit on either side to fill in part of the gaps. Five strips for each side plus six small pieces glued in spot to cover the screws. Yes screws. I actually used some pretty decent screws to bond the strips to the main cover piece. Since I had a piece of panel board in the middle, this gave a lot of reinforcement that the cover needed and allowed the screws to having something more solid to screw into.
Top portion of the cover
I then used a leftover piece of click flooring to screw into the wall. I did this because I knew I would have to install hinges to allow the cover to flip. Corrugated is strong but I only had one layer of it against the back and that would not be strong enough for the screws to anchor into. I used the flooring to secure the hinges to the wall and then attached the other portion of the hinges to the backside of the cover.
I used one long piece of corrugated folded up to make a handle and screwed that in place and put a little wire on the handle to be used to hold the door open when piling wood. I then used another 29″ long strip to build a small piece to cover the front of the cover. There wasn’t anything really for screws to go in securely because of the layout of the board so I secured it with some good ole duct tape I had from my geocaching stuff.
When all is said and done, we now have a cover for our wood chute that will most definitely keep the cats out and will reduce the amount of cold air leaking into the main room from the wood room. It’s not a perfect solution but it didn’t cost me a cent. I reused materials I had around the house and it worked like a charm.
For someone who isn’t much of a handyman, this came out pretty good 🙂
