The Burning Barrel

When we met the previous owners of our beach property at settlement, we noticed that the guy was obsessed with one thing that he left behind--his "burning barrel."  He kept saying how much he wanted it but had no way to move it.  We had no real interest in keeping it, but we sure we were NOT about to provide any sort of aid to people who had left us with such a mess.

Well, this weekend, we decided to actually use the barrel.

It has been unseasonably warm in Delaware, and we decided to take advantage of the 55-degree day to clean out the shed, which not surprisingly, was almost as disgusting as the house.

Mice had shredded old insulation to make nests, and the floor was so caked with dirt that I actually had to use a scraper to loosen it before I could sweep.  

The first thing we did was empty the barrel.  The idiot had left it in the shed filled to overflowing with scrap wood--it was too heavy to move and too full to light.  

Once it was empty enough to move, we got it outside and Doug got it going with some newspaper that we brought:

 

Doug tended the fire while I bagged trash that we couldn't burn:

Once the shed was cleaned and organized, I was able to move all of the tools, paint, and other supplies that we had left on the porch.  Now we have an empty porch, ready for renovation when spring comes, and a relatively neat shed:

We came home with the back of our pickup truck full of junk that wasn't salvageable or burnable: an old air conditioner, a pressboard table leaf, 40 or 50 empty plastic containers from landscape plants, four contractors bags of trash, and about 20 partially used cans of old paint that will need to go to a recycling center.

The burning barrel turned out to be one of the few things left behind that actually turned out to be useful.