You can never engage in woodworking without wood. As such, you must have wood stocks at your disposal whenever you need to dabble in woodworking. Yet, if you’re a beginner in woodworking, you might get confused upon seeing the sheer number of wood species and types in the market. Hence, it is crucial that you know which wood to buy, how you can buy it, and where to buy it.
You got several places from where you can buy the wood you will need for your project. But if you don’t know these places, you might make unreasonable wood purchases with padded prices. Thus, it will be best to read through this post to understand where and how you can best purchase wood for your projects.
10 Primary Wood Sources
You can save effort, time, and money if you know where to purchase the best wood for your woodworking projects. To fill you in on these different places, you can check out the following best sources of wood for woodworking:
1) Local Woodworking Stores and Shops
Before you even venture outside your vicinity or county just to look for wood, it will help if you check your local woodworking shops or stores for available wood supplies. You can ask some professional woodworkers and hobbyists in your area where these local woodworking shops and stores are located.
Those passionate about woodworking are often the best persons to ask regarding where they source their wood. Of course, they may direct you to a store with a limited collection of wood. Yet, they would surely provide you with the necessary information about where to buy wood nearby. Besides, they could also serve as your sounding board whenever you want information and feedback about your projects.
You can also locate these stores online through local listings and phonebooks. Furthermore, many areas and communities have smaller stores that sell wood. Nevertheless, shopping at these stores within your area may net you a limited wood selection. Moreover, the wood prices might be higher than those you find online or at Lowe’s.
2) Home Improvement Retailers and Stores
One well-known destination to get the needed wood for your woodworking projects is home improvement retailers and stores. Home Depot and Lowe’s are two of the frequently visited home improvement stores. These two home improvement stores carry various lumber options with different gradings, sizes, and features from which you can select.
Besides, they usually ship your orders directly to your home address. You can also visit their site and choose the delivery options you would like to have.
One advantage of buying from these large stores include higher consistency and quality of wood, more extensive online wood catalogs and selections, ease of access to required wood, same place or location of wood, and popular wood availability.
3) Woodworking Shops Online
With the introduction of the World Wide Web, everything goes online, even the buying of popular woods for woodworking. The internet is far-reaching, allowing you to order and source your required wood from distant stores and places. Plus, the buying process becomes easy and comfortable.
Nevertheless, buying online comes with some downsides. First, you can’t see first-hand the wood you will purchase and fail to see if it doesn’t have any minor defects. Second, you need to shoulder the shipping cost, which can be high, especially if you order in bulk.
4) Woodcraft Store
Another location where you can buy wood for your projects is a woodcraft store. There, you can purchase high-quality wood for your woodworking projects. Woodcraft stores not only sell wood. They can also sell tools for woodcraft.
You will find many wood types in woodcraft stores. You will discover basswood, for example, and other lighter woods for wood crafting. The lumber they sell, of course, is best for doing small crafty projects. So, if you have woodcraft stores near your place, you can always visit them to find the needed wood for your woodworking projects.
5) Hardware Store
You can also find wood at hardware stores, which are pretty like home improvement stores because you can only find limited stocks of wood at hardware. However, from the hardware, you can buy unique, specialized, and different wood, which you can never find at home improvement stores.
You can find, for example, pine and oak at hardware stores. You will also discover wood materials not offered at the home improvement stores. Hardware stores, however, are small compared to home improvement stores. But you may chance upon unique tools and appliques at the hardware stores.
6) Lumberyard
At the lumberyard, you can find various wood types like those you can use for construction, uncommon wood pieces, weather-treated pieces, and many other types of wood. One upside of buying wood at a lumberyard is you get great discounts if you purchase in bulk. Besides, you will get better prices compared to those of the abovementioned locations. Moreover, you might receive extra wood pieces as a gift.
At the lumberyard, you may find wood pieces of various types, and the selections are wide-ranging. However, the woods at lumberyards get usually exposed to weather factors and elements. But if you are not so much concerned about this exposure, you can always purchase wood from there.
7) Local Woodworking Groups Online
The good thing about our contemporary time is you can always find woodworking groups online and easily join them. You can use these groups as your sounding boards for every question and query you want to be enlightened with. Besides, they can also inform you where you can best find the wood you need. Plus, some members can trade wood with you.
The members of these groups are a good source of information if you are ever looking for a specific wood to use in your projects. Furthermore, these groups provide an excellent venue to get to know fellow enthusiasts in woodworking. They can also direct you to sources of cheaper but quality wood.
8) Local Flooring Companies
Another potentially good source of quality wood is the local flooring companies. Sometimes, if you’re losing leads to quality local wood products that are less expensive, you can always check nearby home improvement and flooring improvement companies. These companies may provide helpful information about wood suppliers within your area. Besides, they can sell you wood remnants from the houses they have worked on.
It is easy to find these companies. Simply go online and type in the search tab “local flooring companies.” It will indeed not hurt to get acquainted and network with these people, for they could provide you with future wood resources.
9) Landowners Cutting Down Their Trees
If you are lucky enough, you may chance upon a landowner cutting a tree within their compound. Cut-down trees or corpses of trees can be a good source of lumber for your projects. So, you better be on the lookout for landowners who are in the process of cutting down trees within their properties.
Depending on how much these landowners will charge you for their wood, you might be spending more for these types of wood because you still need to pay for their shipping and handling. Besides, you must season these lumber pieces if they are newly cut. The price of their wood also depends on the species of the wood.
10) Recycled Wood or Scrap Wood
You might not have thought about it, but shipping crates and pallets are excellent sources of pieces of wood for your projects. You can recycle this wood and create lovely furniture. Besides, you can check Craigslist for these types of wood. Check if someone has extra scrap wood for recycling at an affordable rate.
You can also check stores with scraps of wood from their previous projects. These wood scraps are usually available at times, and thus, you need to keep an eye on these instances so that when opportunities come, you can grab these scraps and pay promptly.
You can also check factory cutoffs for wood remnants from their furniture. Furniture is often mass-produced items. You can check them out online. Besides, many of these wood remnants are sold at a weight limit for each box instead of piece by piece. Furthermore, you can’t choose the type of wood you will get.
How to Figure Out the Ideal Wood for Your Woodworking Projects?
You can raise the quality of your woodworking projects a notch higher if you are using an excellent wood piece. Yet, finding the ideal wood for a project is always challenging, especially if you’re a newbie in woodworking. Hence, before you even shell out your hard-earned money for pieces of wood, it will help to know the following succinct factors to consider when purchasing wood for your projects:
Wood’s Quality
One of the factors you should consider when buying wood for your projects is the wood quality. The reason is apparent. You need to select quality wood for your projects because the quality and durability of your projects hinge on the quality of the wood.
Of course, it will not break the bank if you buy cheaper wood pieces from some of the abovementioned wood sources. Yet, if all you can get is less quality wood, it will be best to spend more on quality wood.
Remember that nothing can replace a quality wood when it comes to woodworking projects. As such, given a chance, always go for excellent wood pieces.
Required Sizing
Another factor you must consider is the sizing requirements of your project. Depending on the project type you would make, you can always ensure that the wood you will buy will be sufficient for your project. Check the building blueprints for your project to get the required sizing.
If you are doing your project without building blueprints, you can figure out the project’s design and determine the specific measurements of wood you will use.
If you use a four-meter-long wood, you need to go longer than that size because wood might shrink when you plane or work on it.
Besides, if your project requires the actual size of 2×4, you should go more than the 2×4 dimensions because the nominal and the exact sizes of wood differ. It will also help if you learn more about the wood species and how they would shrink or expand when used over time.
Types of Wood Cut
Another factor you must look into are the different types of woodcuts. Wood gets cut differently. Some are plain-sawn, the standard and common boards you will find in the lumber yard. These plain-sawn wood pieces exhibit growth rings running below thirty degrees against the board’s face. The board’s face grain appears to be wavy and circular.
Another type of cut is rift-sawn wood. These boards exhibit growth rings that intersect with the face anywhere between thirty to sixty degrees. Rift-sawn panels also show straight grain patterns in contrast to plain sawn boards’ wavy and circular grain patterns.
Besides, they offer more stability. You can buy them at a higher cost.
Quarter-sawn boards are those with growth rings that are less than sixty degrees from the straight grain pattern. They also have ribbon or flake-like figures. Moreover, they exhibit more excellent stability and are more pricey than the two types of cuts mentioned above. Besides, you will often find these cuts in some wood species like white oak.
Defects of the Wood
As a beginner in woodworking, you might not be wary of wood defects. But as you become a more experienced woodworker, you begin to select the wood you use carefully. Of course, it is not wrong to purchase wood with splits, cracks, knots, and checks because these flaws only affect a minimal portion of the wood. Thus, you can cut in places with no flaws like these.
However, defects like warps, bows, and twists in wood are hard to remedy. So, it will help if you are wary of these defects. Test the board by placing them flat on the floor to determine its flaws. If the boards are warped, you should not purchase them.
Wood Grades
Wood grades signify the level of severity of the board’s defects. As a beginner in woodworking, it will be best to familiarize yourself with these varying grades as delineated by NHLA or National Hardwood Lumber Association. These grades include first grade with minimal defects visible and Second-grade with occasional knots or surface defects.
You can use both second and first-grade wood for building furniture. Select grades are those with more defects but nothing extensive. You can’t use this one for fine furniture. On the other hand, four Grades have many flaws for use in furniture making.
Conclusion
Knowledge is power, and the more you know, the better you can do something. Similarly, if you buy wood for your projects, it will help to know where to head to. This way, you will not waste time and effort while getting the best wood available for you in the market.
Time wasted, of course, is money wasted. Thus, if you know exactly where to go when needing wood, you can deliberately head to that place without any qualms or dilly-dallying. This way, you will save time and money along the way.