Where to find lumber

Basically, whenever someone makes a post related to your search, you will get an email notification. This will give you dibs on some of the free lumber people give away. To apply search notifications, simply Sign up for Craigslist , search for your keyword ie. Another great way to get cheap lumber is to find items that are already built from lumber.

Go to your local salvation army or goodwill and look for old pieces of furniture. Many of them have great lumber that you can recycle into something great. You can use Craigslist to your advantage when using this strategy. A lot of people in my area will toss their old desks or broken furniture in their yard and then post it on Craigslist so someone will pick it up and get it out of their way.

Last year I made it my mission to make an entire woodworking project using free lumber I found on the side of the road. It took a couple weeks of searching Craigslist and driving around neighborhoods like a weirdo, but I was able to come up with enough lumber to make an awesome table for a friend. Not only does it feel awesome to save money, it feels even better to recycle something old into something fresh and unique!

Letgo is an app that is great for finding free lumber for woodworking. One of the easiest ways to get free lumber for woodworking is to visit construction sites. They always have tons of scrap lumber and plywood pieces.

Here's the right way to stack your wood. It's called "sticking". Put little sticks between each layer of wood. That encourages airflow and drying. If you stack boards on boards water will wick in between and stay there. Your wood will rot, mold and get eaten by slugs and bugs.

Stack your lumber in the shade if possible or it will crack and warp. This stack has a plywood board on top to shed rain. It's on a wheeled dolly which was handy for moving it until I got it into the perfect spot. After you stick your wood the bugs will start dying off. They need air and water. Sticking the wood lets it dry out, reducing the water. Slugs and snails will disappear. If you seal the wood all inhabitants die cuz it cuts off the air.

Epoxy is good for this. Linseed oil has worked well for me also. Throwing your wood in sea water until it sinks is a good trick to try. But don't leave it there. Borers such as gribble and teredo only live in salt water. They die when the board is put in fresh water or taken out into the air. The live beetles in these shelf brackets gave me fantasies that the insects would chew through them, dropping my axe collection on my head. Then Jesse Hensel told me a trick his dad used.

Just put the wood in the freezer and the insects will die. Or maybe the trick was really "do nothing" since they live in Fairbanks Alaska and everything there is a freezer. This company in southern Maine makes wine racks. They buy 20 foot long bundles of plantation-grown tropical hardwood from Malaysia.

Supposedly it's "rainforest-safe" The bundles come wrapped top and bottom with same-species boards with odd dimensions to protect the rest. The pallets included straight-grained boards 20 feet long. I stopped and asked about the pile. The manager was delighted. He couldn't use this in his factory because it was too thin or a slightly different color etc.

He'd been wishing someone would use it for something. He was going to have to pay someone to cut it up and burn it. Then he showed me more piles where he'd saved the best boards from previous burns and gave me that too. I piled my truck the previous "Ugly Truckling" with enough wood to almost do a wheelie.

A lot of my instructables projects were made using that wood. Ah, isn't the wood effectively 'quarantined' to prevent spread of the ash borer beetle? And aren't you risking a of spread of the infestation? I don't have any direct knowledge of the laws involved, etc. But I wouldn't transport that stuff across any state lines. Reply 13 years ago on Introduction.

Reply 12 years ago on Introduction. Reply 2 months ago. Reply 2 years ago. Reply 5 years ago. The St. Lawrence Seaway , of course. Anyway, all a foreign species "vector" needs is place to hide usually crate or pallet wood and transportation--a ship from Asia to California, then a train or truck to the midwest He tells you how to kill the bugs. Freeze them. Or seal them in with polyurethane.

You can't kill borers by "sealing them in" with polyurethane. There are a few things to look for when you're looking to pick up some previously used lumber. You want to make sure it's free of bugs and pests and that it's fairly clean. It should be nice and sturdy without cracks and large splinters. In most locations, there are construction sites somewhere nearby, which may be one of the biggest sources of free lumber.

If it's a new construction build they may have extra scraps of lumber that they aren't using. This could be extremely helpful if you're making something small with the lumber that you're looking for. Sites that are tearing down old homes and buildings are going to have the wood removed from the site to make room for their new projects, and there are two ways you can take advantage of his.

The first is a one-off. Find an employee at the site and ask if you can talk to his manager or supervisor. Once you've met with someone of authority over the area, ask if you can take some of the lumber off their hands for them. They'll probably be willing to comply because they surely have a budget in place for a removal service, and you'll be doing it for free.

The other option is similar but is meant for the long term. Make a deal where you'll come back on a regular basis to haul off as much scrap and debris as you can if you can exchange that labor for free lumber. This may work by having you leave a trailer at the site where they can dump what they can onto it.

You can go through the pile at home every day or week and discard what you don't want. If you go with this second scenario, you may even leave two trailers and insist that they put usable lumber on one and everything else on another, which would make it much easier for you to manage. This means a little extra work for them, but it's worth a shot to ask. Given that construction projects normally dispose of a lot more than what can fit on your two trailers, you probably won't be taking away all of their waste but removing even a fraction of it can save them money in the long run.

Something may still be useful if the majority of it isn't salvageable. Watch out for these types of things as you're working at home and with other people.

For example, when throwing out an old bed, just get rid of the mattress—there's no need to toss the whole thing. Even if you can't make use of all of the wooden frame, you may be able to tear down some of the pieces and use them for something else.

Wooden furniture can be a great way to find some extra lumber that's still in quality condition.