Despite the rise of steel and plastic, wood remains an essential and time-honored material for construction, and many Americans pursue wood crafting as a hobby, creating furniture and canoes, among other items, in a personal workshop. And even for homeowners who don’t have the craft skills to work with wood themselves, anyone will want quality lumber to be used when installing or updating floorboards, making furniture, or the frames of new houses. In the United States today, various species of hardwood are out there for construction such as figured cheery or big leaf maple wood, and different woods like figured cherry will offer different colors and patterns for aesthetics and will have differing costs and properties as construction materials. What is more, someone looking for wood shop materials or new floorboards can explore various avenues for finding the right wood. Where to start?
Wood Today
For millennia, wood has been a staple for constructing homes, tools, boats, and more, and even today, wood is critical for construction, and new technology for lumber-jacking, protecting wood products from damage, and more can be used so that wood is tougher and more efficient than ever. In fact, wood stands as the most energy-efficient construction material available, and making items from glass, metal, or brick is estimated to cost about 126 times more energy than a product made from wood such as slab lumber or various hardwoods. And today, a single-family home may contain an average of 13,000 board feet of lumber or so, and 94% new homes today are built with wooden frames. This is a big industry; 950,000 Americans are employed by the U.S. forest products industry, and worldwide, wood-based panel products sales amounted to $416 million in 2016. Other items such as furniture is often made from wood or wood pulp, and even paper is involved, since paper is made from wood pulp, and any wood crafter will want the right lumber for their home construction projects. Where to find it?
A person looking for lumber products today should consider a number of factors such as the properties and price of the woods that they would like to use, and various common hardwood species in the United States from maple to oak to figured cherry vary in price per board or square foot, as well as strength and use in different projects such as house frames or furniture or even boats. If a person is unsure what sort of wood to get for a project, or how much, they can turn to experts. Local hardware stores will have entire sections of the store dedicated to lumber and wood, from planks and boards to sheets of it, and store associates should be able to help any customer with their question and guide them to whatever wooden products are most price-friendly and effective for the kind of work being done. Many customers can buy their lumber from these hardware stores such as figured cherry and more.
Another option is, if possible, to visit local lumber mills and consult with the expert crews there. What is more, a lumber mill may have an enormous variety of hardwoods available, since unlike a hardware store, lumber mills will specialize in this material, and lumber mills might be found anywhere where hardwood forests are found, such as along the East Coast. A Philadelphia resident with a wood shop may visit Pennsylvania hardwoods lumber mills to get the best local products possible, and they can conduct an online search to find these mills such as “lumber mills in PA” to find the directions to such a mill so they can visit. Transporting lumber may require a pickup truck or a trailer to carry it from the lumber mill to the home where a person can then use it in their workshop.
Cherry wood, such as figured cherry, has been a staple for American construction ever since the colonial period, and for many years, cherry and similar woods were used along the East Coast for construction of wagons, furniture, home, and much more, and today, a person can use figured cherry and similar hardwood species to recreate a charmingly rustic look for their home and its furniture if so desired, and keep an American construction tradition alive.