Lifehacker: If you have a home project that's taking a while, it’s likely that you’ve thought of saving space by storing your lumber outdoors. It can seem like a good way to alleviate the clutter caused by home improvement projects, but it's not always a great idea. Here's when it's OK and when it’s not, and how you can identify damage from improperly stored lumber.
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Storing lumber is an interesting problem. On one hand, it can be beneficial to get the lumber you need for a certain project, but it is also good to keep a variety of kinds of boards in case you need a piece of scrap wood or miscellaneous board when it comes time to finish another project. While it is good to have lumber on hand, it does take up a lot of space. This can be particularly problematic when you have a very small shop or no shop at all. I know that I have all kinds of offcuts and donated lumber sitting around in my basement, taking up a lot of space that could be used for other things. One thing that I should probably think about more is how useful scrap pieces of lumber actually are. A small offcut of 1x4 that is only 3” long and cut at a weird angle might be useful for something, but may also just sit in a bin of similar chunks for a very long time.
So I'm definitely not an expert on lumber but I do know a bit about it. Like the article said, there are a lot of factors contributing to how one stores their lumber. For one, what the wood is being used for is quite important. If it is something that is being used decoratively it is stored quite differently than something that is mission critical. One thing that may be quite an important factor is climate. If you live somewhere dry and hot, storing lumber outside is going to be quite different than if you live in a swamp. All this being said, there is no one right way to store wood, that is unless you have an absolutely unbelievably large budget to have a climate controlled storage solution, which is not a reasonable thing for every woodworker to have.
Having worked in small theatres with little to no storage space, the thought of storing things outside has come up. Though it's been stored outside for any length of time usually because one can never really predict when it's going to rain and for no other reason. I found it interesting that the article talked about when you could leave lumber outside, because I was always taught to never store wood in the elements because it can lead to more complications and therefore it is just better all-around to not store it outside to avoid that. It is very helpful that it informs the reader how to repurpose the wood stored outside, and how to tell whether or not its savable. I know that I have thrown out many pieces of wood that have been ruined by the elements, but it is helpful to know the exact things to look for when deciding whether or not wood is savable.
This was really interesting to use as someone who has been put in the unfortunate position of having to use weathered wood in set building.I would like to preface this by saying that this was not a decision that I had made or was a part of in any way other than my presence as a small freshman in high school. in between when it had been purchased and when it had arrived at the place where we built our sets, there had been quite a bit of rain, and all of the wood, all the new, was warped. I remember having to stand on the wood like a seesaw as my job was literally just to try and force the wood back into its natural flat shape. At that point in my high school career, none of the sets we made had ever been particularly astounding with their attention to safety, but that's it was particularly bad I think. Thankfully it didn't have to hold much load, but even as someone who knew nothing about building sets at that time, I knew it was wrong. The joys of public high school I guess.
Lumber storage is one of the hardest things about having a personal shop where you would like to have a consistent supply of material to work with. There are a lot of systems out there like dehumidifiers and using a dedicated room for lumber storage, but a lot of the time it just so happens that lumber ends up standing vertically in an unused corner. There are definitely situations where lumber that has been stored ends up not being useful, but at the same time I do think that the article makes it seem much worse than it usually is. I think a lot of people are using scrap wood for decorative items rather than for anything that needs structural integrity, but I could envision a few instances where I am wrong. I think it's always safer to buy new lumber for anything that needs to have real support on it, but this article does show good things to look out for in the case where someone were planning to use left-over lumber for a task where it needed to be really good and clean.
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