Woodworking in the Chicago Suburbs: What's Actually Around You

The hardwoods growing in DuPage, Cook, Kane, and Will counties are some of the best furniture wood in North America. Most of it ends up as mulch.

That's not a complaint, it's a fact. When a tree comes down in a backyard in Wheaton or Naperville or Glen Ellyn, the homeowner's incentive is to get it gone. The fastest call is to a tree service that grinds it up and hauls it away. The log is on the truck before anyone's asked whether there's a slab in there.

For people who do woodworking around here, that's the opportunity.

What grows here

Walnut. Black walnut grows huge in this region — 36-inch trunks aren't unusual in older neighborhoods. The heartwood is the dark chocolate stuff people pay good money for in furniture. A good urban walnut will yield slabs that would cost three figures per board foot if you bought them dimensioned.

White oak. The weight, the openness of the grain, the ray fleck when you quartersaw it. Mid-sized urban white oaks come down in this area constantly.

Maple. Hard maple and soft maple both grow well here. Soft maple gets called silver maple in yards — it's the one with the limbs that fall in every storm. Plain at first glance, occasionally hiding curl or quilt that doesn't show until the first cut opens it up.

Ash. The emerald ash borer killed millions of trees across the Chicago area in the last twenty years. A lot of those logs are still coming down. Ash is a beautiful, light-colored, ring-porous hardwood — bowling alleys and baseball bats are made from it. The blight is heartbreaking. The supply, for now, is real.

Hackberry, elm, cherry, hickory. All grow here. All worth catching before they hit the chipper.

What it means to use local

Local doesn't just mean lower transportation cost. It means the wood you build with came out of a tree that lived through the same winters your finished piece is going to live through. It's already been seasonally cycled, year after year, by the climate it'll end up in.

That's an advantage you don't get from kiln-dried Pennsylvania walnut shipped to a yard in Illinois.

The catch

Urban trees are not forest trees. Forest walnut grows tall and straight because it competes with the canopy. Yard walnut grows wide and branchy because it had room. That gives you spectacular crotch figure and burl at the branch unions, and it gives you twist, reaction wood, and stress that shows up the moment you make the first cut.

It also gives you whatever the tree grew around. Fences. Clotheslines. The hammer somebody left on the woodpile in 1962. We've found all of it. The first hint is usually the bandsaw blade.

Where to start if you want to work with local wood

Find a real source. We're one. There are others. The signal is whether they can tell you what species, where it came from, when it was felled, and what its current moisture content is. If they can't answer any of those, that's not a source, that's a guy with a stack.

Start with what's stable. Air-dried wood is great for thick rustic builds. Kiln-dried, project-ready wood at 6 to 8% MC is what you want for fine furniture in a heated indoor space.

Get a tool that doesn't fight you. A bandsaw, a planer, a jointer, a router, and a way to flatten slabs (CNC, router sled, or someone like us doing it for you). That's the kit.

Build something for your house first. The wood from your county, in your house, in your climate. That's the whole point.

What we do here

Mill, dry, flatten, supply lumber, build custom pieces from the wood we milled and dried. The whole arc, in one shop, on Carolina Drive in West Chicago. Most of what we sell came from a tree that grew within a 30-mile radius of where you'll use it.

That's the local woodworking story, when there is one. Not a heritage. A supply chain that's three steps long instead of three hundred.