Many years ago, on a road trip to the Kitchener/Waterloo area we picked up an old whisky barrel. I remember that we saw a sign on the side of the road saying they had barrels for sale and I thought it would be a great idea to buy one. As great of an idea as this was, fitting it in our vehicle was an entirely different matter. However we did have success!

When we arrived home we transformed it into a rain barrel, before rain barrels were even a thing. We used it for many years and collected rain to water our plants. Eventually it started to break down and wasn’t such a good rain barrel anymore but, we couldn’t bare to let it go to waste. So we disassembled it, we kept all the long barrel slats, and removed all the metal barrel rings.

We saved these materials for years, knowing that they would be used for different projects one day. My husband created an awesome light fixture for his office using some of the wooden slats.

Our latest project though was for our fire pit area. We wanted to create a space where we could keep the wood for our summer evening camp fires. We selected two of the smaller barrel rings, and went to Home Depot to purchase some heavy duty twine. The next step was to saw one of the barrel slats in half for the base. After assembling this fire wood holder we placed it out in our backyard and it works like a charm and looks good too!