Picking Wood for the Job: Furniture, Framing, Decking

Wrong wood, wrong outcome. The dining table that splits along the breadboard end. The deck that's grey and cupped in three years. The shelf that bows under a row of books. None of those failures are mysteries. Each one started with a board that wasn't right for what it had to do.

Here's how we think about it.

Furniture

Furniture wants stability and a face you can look at for thirty years.

That means hardwood, dried to 6–8% moisture content, with grain you actually like. Walnut for the dark warmth. White oak for the weight and the ray fleck if you quartersaw it. Hard maple for kitchen surfaces and anywhere a knife might land. Cherry for the customers who want it to keep changing color over the next decade.

What furniture does not want is wood that came from somewhere humid last month. A board that was 14% MC when you bought it and 7% MC after a winter in your house has shrunk in width by something like 1.5% — enough to crack a wide top, pull a tenon, or open a glue joint. Get the wood to where the room is before you build, or build with the wrong assumptions.

The faces should be flat. We run slabs across a 4 ft x 4 ft CNC at $100/hr, detail to 1/32 inch. What you pick up is what goes on the base.

Framing

Framing is where most of our customers don't need us, and we'll tell you that.

Spruce-pine-fir from a lumberyard, graded for structural use, is what frames a wall. It's cheap, consistent, code-approved, and the supply chain is set up to deliver it by the truckload. We don't compete with that.

Where we come in on framing is the visible part. Exposed beams. Mantels. Timber-framed accents in a finished space. When a customer wants a 6x10 walnut beam with a live-edge bottom running across a great room, that's our work. The wood is dry, the surfaces are right, and it will look like that beam in twenty years.

Decking

Decking is its own animal. It's outdoors, getting wet, getting hot, getting cold, with no protection from any of it.

Pressure-treated southern yellow pine is the standard answer because it's cheap and the chemicals keep the bugs and rot out. It will check, it will twist, and it needs sealing every couple of years, but it'll be there in fifteen.

Western red cedar is prettier and naturally rot-resistant. Softer, dents easier, costs more, ages to silver-grey if you don't oil it.

Ipe and other dense tropical hardwoods are the long-haul option — 25 to 40 years, hard as iron, expensive, heavy enough that you'll learn things about your saw blades you didn't want to know.

We don't stock decking lumber as a regular line. We stock furniture-grade hardwood. If you came in asking for a deck, we'd send you to the right place.

The honest version

Most of what gets called "the wrong wood" is actually the right wood used for the wrong thing. Hard maple is wonderful. Hard maple on an outdoor bench is a mistake. Pressure-treated pine works hard. Pressure-treated pine in a dining room is a mistake.

Pick wood for the job and dry it before you build. The rest is detail.