Firewood Tarp Tie Down

It's been a really expensive year for me, excavation and French drain install, dog with two knee surgeries, etc., etc. I built this firewood rack from an Instructable about 3 years ago and it's FABULOUS! but keeping the tarps secure from blowing wind has been a pain. The tarps themselves are not great, even though I bought the "weather resistant." I have an abundance of bricks just lying around and that's what I've been using to keep the tarps from blowing away. I thought about purchasing some of the heavy duty rubber tie downs that have the hooks at each end and then asking my son to cut some metal and put some holes in them so I could run the hooks through the holes and secure them, whereby I could lay them across the tarps. I'm tired of spending money so I came up with this idea instead. Maybe it's not permanent but I'm pretty sure they'll last a year or two.

Called around and found a bike shop that had a big box of discarded inner tubes. Took them home and the first thing was to cut around both ends of the valve stem, leaving just the tube. As you can see from the image, the middle left shows a thinner tube (like from a 10 speed), which is much easier to work with than that of the thicker one to the right. These 10-speed type of tubes are also longer.

The thinner tubes allowed me to easily tie each end of the tube around a brick, without splitting the tubes. I guess if I would have taken the time, I could have split the thicker tubes down the middle but I didn't want to take the time. I have other things to do today. Besides, maybe not splitting the inner tubes will result in their lasting longer than if I had split them in half. I wrapped the tube twice around each brick.

Then I just laid them across my tarps. And there you go. You don't necessarily need brick. I suppose anything heavy enough will work just as well. I like free and easy stuff.