I’ll never forget the nice sunny day when we were moving to the new house. I had hired some folks with a truck, and we were making our last run to the house with my new couches, when out of nowhere, a black cloud appeared in the air, and within minutes was dumping rain all over us and the new couches. Did anyone have a tarp? Nope. Not me, not the guys with the truck. The couches got absolutely soaked. Lesson learned. Tarps are an essential item.

Now that I’m in the house, I have a lovely fireplace that I use in the wintertime. Of course, anyone with a fireplace knows that you can’t burn wood if it’s wet. And since I don’t live in the desert, the wood has to be covered up, or it gets soaked and simply smolders away, stinking up the house but not warming it. So, guess what I use to cover up the wood? A tarp! It has made a vast improvement in terms of the quality of fires that we now have.

My son likes to use it to make a tent. Did you know that you can string a piece of rope between two trees, hang a tarp over it, and have an instant “tent”? Kids love it. I also hear they like using tarps in the summer. What you do is get it wet, and let the kids slide around on it. My kid doesn’t know about this yet. He’s not going to. It might mess up the wood.

Of course I could always get two tarps. I like how WholesaleTarp.net has a whole bunch of colors to choose from, just in case bright blue isn’t the color of tarp you want covering your wood in your backyard. The prices are right, too. Maybe the blue one would make a good water slide…