Home Depot Orange Buckets, Lids, and the big bags (.75 cu ft) of Char Broil Wood

[noboundaries]

I have my outdoor kitchen set up with WSM, 22.5" Kettle, 18.5" Kettle, and Kenmore 5 burner gas grill set at 90 degrees to the charcoalers.  I put all my outdoor utensils, rib racks, beer can chicken holder racks, gloves, etc in a large Sterilite container with a snap lid underneath one of the the wings of my gas grill.  Unfortunately, with no dry storage area in my backyard, hauling wood and charcoal from the garage through the house to the BBQ area was a bit of an annoyance.  Time for a solution.

We had a bunch of unused, orange Home Depot buckets and lids in the garage left over from a project in 2012.  Total cost is like $3.50 for the bucket and lid together.  I started using one of the buckets and lids for my charcoal briquettes, keeping it out by the grills and smoker.  Even in the hardest downpour and high winds, the bricks stay dry as a bone in the bucket.  All my gear stays dry in the Sterilite with lid too (I keep the Mav 732/probes in the house in a shoebox Sterilite to save on the batteries).   

I put some of the big bags of wood in the Sterilite but they were taking up too much room.  Consequently I dumped one of the large bags of Char Broil wood in one of the Home Depot buckets.  A full bag of wood fits PERFECTLY in the bucket!  You have to shake it a little to make it settle, but it fits!  The wood stays bone dry in the rain and wind with the lid.  I don't even press the lid all the way down, just enough to catch on 3/4's of the rim so it is easy to remove.  The buckets stack nicely and I label each lid with a permanent market with the type of wood inside.

Target and Walmart both sell the Sterilite's cheap.  I've got the biggest one that would fit in my covered truck bed and it was like $8.

Just a thought in case you hate hauling wood, briquettes/lump, and gear to your charcoal smoker and have no place to store it nearby.

 

[sushitampa]

Love the idea, i originally bought a Home dept orange bucket to dump the last cooks ashes in but i like this idea much better!

 

[noboundaries]

Thanks sushitampa!

Here's another solution for the ashes, though it's a bit pricier than the plastic bucket.

I am fanatic about dumping ashes and making sure they are absolutely DEAD COLD.  We had a former neighbor who lost their garage to a fire because they dumped BBQ ashes in their trash can they thought were cold. Some still had enough heat that they ignited the trash and then the garage.

My old 22.5" Weber Kettle is a pre-Performer Style One Touch.  It doesn't have the charcoal bucket or the gas igniter, just the attached table, lower shelf, and ash catcher.  The attached ash catcher bucket was nice for solving the hot ash issue.  Obviously there's no such thing on the WSM.

Once again, at Home Depot I bought a Behrens "6 gallon silver metallic trash can," basically a galvanized metal bucket with a locking lid.  $16.  My wife saw me dumping the ash-filled WSM bottom into the bucket and bought me a Weber Ash Shovel, $13.  Man, I LOVE that shovel!  The radius of the shovel fits the curvature of the WSM bowl beautifully and makes ash cleanup a breeze!  The shovel fits nicely in the bucket and the bucket fits nicely on the rack under the table on the Weber Kettle.

Anyway, just another idea.