Who doesn’t want to save some money when purchasing wood? Here are ten tips to help reduce the cost of purchasing lumber without reducing the quality of your wood working project.
1. Build less visible parts from lower cost woods.
Hidden parts of the project do not need to be built out of the same wood as the visible parts. For example, drawer bodies, drawer supports, spaces, and shelves can be built out of less expensive wood such as poplar or plywood.
2. Buy shorter boards.
Many hardwood dealers specialize in ‘first and seconds’ and ‘select’ grades of lumber. To meet this requirement boards must be six or eight feet long. The short boards are typically of the same or better grade as the higher grades. They usually sell for 30 percent less than the ‘first and seconds’ price.
Recalculate your materials list to take advantage of shorter boards or boards that have imperfections such as rough grain or knots.
3. Buy lower grades of lumber.
Below the ‘first and seconds’ and select are the #1 and #2 common. These boards are narrower and yield fewer clear cuts. They typically sell for 30 percent less then the premium lumber.
You might have additional waste; however, with some extra effort you can reuse the scrape wood in the project or in a future project. If nothing else, small scrape hard wood makes for nice fuel in the fire place.
4. Form a buying group.
Pooling the lumber needs of several woodworking buddies into a single purchase, you can take advantage of volume price discounts without having to purchase all of the lumber yourself. Now, the interesting part will be determining what each person’s share of the order. The volume discount might well be worth the extra effort to calculate each person’s share.
5. Shop the sales.
Woodworkers love their lumber. Yet to a dealer, it is just another product that needs to be sold and inventory managed. Hardwood dealers will sometimes offer clearance or overstock sales to move inventory that has been sitting on the racks too long.
This will require you to plan out your projects in advance with material lists. You don’t want to go and buy a bunch of lumber just because it is on sale. Well, you might want to. But your spouse may not approve.
