Sorry to necropost, but I think I found a solution to this problem for anyone who happens to stumble upon this thread searching for a solution. The wood chopping blocks don't work properly if your player character is currently in the same cell as the chopping block when you change the .esm. The solution is simple: do your stuff in the CK, then start the game and load from a save where you're in a different cell from the block, and then travel to where the block is and it should now work correctly. I don't know why this is; I'd imagine it's to do with the chopping block script not initializing properly, but at least it's a "fix".
