Navigating the Lumberyard

Here's some lumber lingo you should know before you venture into a lumberyard.

- Gordon H. Bock

Almost everyone fixing an old house will end up at a lumberyard-whether it's a local supplier or the organized aisles of a big-box home-improvement store.

SHOPPING FOR LUMBER

Lumber is wood, needless to say: a natural material. Even with modern production controls, the quality of boards in a stack will vary. Most lumberyards expect customers to inspect boards and cull a stack (to a degree) for best-quality materials. Think of a cook choosing among steaks for cut and optimal marbling. In most retail circumstances, be it a traditional lumberyard or a big-box outlet, you will find the top of the pile scattered with boards rejected by previous buyers for warping or such visible defects as excessive knots or wanes (missing corners or edges). Unless you're a prized or big-dollar customer, going through every single board in a pile for the pick of the litter (called "creaming the stack," in some circles) will have you being seen as uncouth, even in a gritty industry like forest products.

TO KNOT, OR KNOT?

Most house-framing lumber (also called dimensional lumber) sold for joists, studs, planks, and rafters is one of several species of softwoods. These are needlebearing conifers, such as pine, hemlock, spruce, and Douglas fir, botanically different from hardwoods-those leaf-bearing trees like oak, maple, and walnut, used for flooring, furniture, and fancy trim. As they are being converted at the mill into boards, the softwoods headed to a lumberyard are graded and sorted according to industry standards for strength, appearance, and likely use. These standards vary regionally across the country-remember that North America is huge and rich in trees of many species. The art and science of timber grading is more complex and international than can be described in an article. For the purposes of what an average old-house customer may be shopping for at a yard, it all boils down to basic grades and knots.