Lumber prices are skyrocketing, and if you’re a hobbyist, it might be tempting to buy whatever you can get as cheaply as possible. Unfortunately, that means some people are turning away from cut to size wood to save a few bucks. After all, sawmills and other suppliers do charge a bit extra to cut the wood for you.
However, that might be the wrong approach, and it might even cost you a bit of money.
Buying cut to size wood has numerous benefits, and we highly recommend you consider those benefits before taking the full DIY route.
Here are a few of the main benefits you should consider.
1: Time Savings
Alright, let’s assume you buy a bunch of raw timber and plan to cut it into the planks you need for your project. Sounds really cost-effective, doesn’t it?
Well, besides the tools you’ll probably need to buy, which we’ll get into later, you’ll also be spending a ton of time doing that. Time is money, and it takes quite a while to properly cut raw wood to size. Not to mention, you might have green wood. That can cause splitting and cracking as the wood dries if you don’t use a kiln to dry it yourself. Again, that’s another tool to buy, and it takes quite a long time. Air drying takes even longer. It takes about a year per inch of thickness to air dry most wood species.
At the end of the day, you could probably complete and sell several complex projects in the time it would take you to process your own wood from scratch. Even if you’re starting with dried wood of the wrong size, you’re still wasting time.
2: Tool Costs
If you’re into woodworking, you likely have the basic tools for precision cuts. Things like table saws, planers, jigsaws, and more are probably just laying around your shop. However, you probably don’t have milling equipment or industrial-sized tools that make splitting up raw wood accurately a breeze.
That equipment can also add thousands of dollars in investments to your simple hobbyist workshop. So, they likely won’t pay for themselves for quite some time.
Even if you’re purchasing proper lumber that’s just the wrong size, you’ll probably need new tools. A proper table saw or circular saw is a must, and if you’re operating a hand-tool woodshop, you won’t have those things.
3: Unnecessary Waste
Finally, waste is a part of woodworking, but it’s also where a lot of the unnecessary costs come from. Excessive material waste also tends to happen most commonly when you’re sizing up wood. Just one bad cut and you can quickly turn your lumber into scrap pieces.
When you decide to cut all your timber to size on your own, you increase the chance of you generating that type of waste, and that drives up costs. It’s also extremely annoying.
Do yourself a favor and save your money, time, and energy by just going with the cut to size wood from the beginning.
My name is Amy and i’ve been a passionate blogger about life, love and travel for many years. I first started blogging in 1997 and it’s been quite a journey since then. I keep my blog up-to-date on a weekly basis and you can also follow me on my Twitter account here: Hello