Cost of rescued wood

When I watch YouTube videos of other people (American men) building things like shanty boats or cabins in the woods, whenever it gets to the tedious bits eg. 'I spent a day doing this one arduous, death-defyingly monotonous task' I think to myself: 'I don't think I could do that'. Yesterday I spent almost two hours de-nailing wood. Boring things look so much worse when one is an onlooker. Doing the task oneself is less so.

When I was doing it I wondered what the cost of each bit of wood was:

3 hours driving and fishing out wood from heap

2 hours de-nailing

1 hour driving to the tip to dispose of unusable pieces

...for...

16 metres of 4x2 (RRP £50)

8 metres of 2x2 (RRP £10)

12 metres of 3x2 (RRP £28)

2 great long planks of floorboard, 1.2 metres of sleeper and 5 metres of 75mmx75mm (RRP £25 conservatively..)

TOTAL: £113

For 6 hours of labour, I get £113 of wood to use on my boat in exchange for my time. That's just under £20 an hour. That's not bad! I've also been generous with the amounts of time in my estimates (de-nailing was more like 1hr 45, not 2 hours etc) as well as the estimates for wood prices.

That surprises me.

Yesterday's de-nailing was a bit tedious but somewhat satisfying. Having a haul with no bits of nail poking out is very reassuring.

The piece of the far left of the above photo was the biggest bugger. It was ABSOLuTELY fused together with nails. I had been using a claw hammer to de-nail up to that point but it was hopeless against this beast. I considered chucking it but the two pieces of 4x2 would be very useful IF I could pry them apart. Considering what to do, there was a powerful voice inside me that said 'Fight for it!'. Staring at it, wondering how to separate them, from God-know-where a lightbulb went off in my nut. I marches to me car, pop the boot and bring out the stick of doom. I put the two pieces on the ground and stab the chiselled end of the metal pole into where the two pieces meet. Smash, smash, smash. I manage to make a small divide between the two and I jimmy the metal stick into a gap which I'm opening out. I move along the piece, dividing the timber as I go. What a feeling! The powers of leverage are wonderful. 'Thank you, Archimedes!' I said to myself. Genuinely (dork). 'What a fine observation that has been absorbed into our collective understanding - Leverage! The thinking man's horsepower'.