www.familyhandyman.com: One of the biggest challenges of working with plywood is getting it home from the store. It usually comes in 4×8 sheets, which is cost-effective and ideal for certain projects, but can be a challenge to transport without a truck. However, it is possible. “I’ve used all manner of transport options to get plywood to my house,” Garrett Poshusta of The Grit and Polish says. It will just take a bit more time, effort and in some cases, money.
8 comments:
Boy, this is a great article. They sure are looking out for all of the amateur carpenters out there. This article would have been really useful to me a few years ago. I have transported large amounts of lumber in my car a number of times. It was definitely sketchy every single time, and was absolutely nothing like this article described. I do have a Honda Pilot, which is a very big SUV, so I was at least not trying to cram a sedan full of lumber. I was able to fit lots of 2 x 4’s comfortably with my rear seats down. However, it got extremely ghetto when it came to sheet plywood and lauan. These sheet goods sadly did not fit as comfortably in my trunk as the stick lumber did. The sheet lumber was too long, so it would only fit at an angle. This did block my rear view mirror, but who needs that anyways!
This article instantly caught my eye, as it touches on an issue that I have personally struggled with (as I’m sure most of us have). When I was a kid, I was really into messing around in my basement and building weird things out of wood. My ultimate project was that I built a very small house with a hinged roof that I could climb in and out of, and I put it on top of a palette which I built and put casters on the sides of. I was kind of hoping that this article would have a secret ingenious solution to this issue about how to make car geometry cooperate with plywood purchasing. I remember having this problem when I was building my tiny house at the age of 12 and what we did is that my dad actually just walked back into Home Depot, bought a handsaw, and cut a thin strip of wood off the side of our 4x4 (not even 4x8!) sheets.
I think this article is quite educational to those who are just starting off with building something, maybe a one off thing to buy plywood for a DIY project at their home or whatever they’re doing. I own a honda civic, and it absolutely has been a fun challenge whenever I need to buy wood for my projects at home, luckily Home Depot was next to my old venue and my home, so I never had to drive more then 10 mins while dealing with it, but still if I lived further this would be an excellent reference at first. It has quite good details which is very helpful to folks who know nothing about this kind of stuff, especially the normal sizing. I feel like to me the solutions are very simple and nothing is groundbreaking, but to people who aren’t majoring in and spending their life being a TD, this would be great to have!
Large items are always hard to travel with but lumber is above all quite challenging. This article talks mostly about how to transport sheets of all different shapes and sizes but what I find the most challenging to transport is stick. You can have 16’ long pieces of lumbar stuck to the top of your little car just attempting to finish your newest project. Some of the suggestions this article gives such as cutting your lumbar at the store would theoretically solve the problem unless your stick needs to remain longer. I also enjoyed the plethora of different option to rent a truck or ship your items to exactly where they need to go but those both cost money. I guess the main solution comes down to how much you find yourself needing to transport lumbar around. If you want the most cost effective method it requires you set yourself up to be able to transport the lumbar such as buy a truck or a good roof rack.
I like the concept of this article as I can totally see the size of a full plywood sheet being a deterrent for home DYI projects, and for some people it would be an impossible barrier if they can not fit the sheet into their car or if they don't have a car at all. I do find it funny though that the article is titled how to get plywood home without a truck, and the article proceeds to tell you that you can rent a truck. That is just funny to me, and shows that the best way to move full sheets of plywood is just to use a truck. I do also worry about the section of the article that suggests that people can use racket straps to attach plywood to roof racks. I am just worried that a home DIYer is gonna buy racket straps and plywood for the first time, and then fail to use the straps correctly and cause damage to their car or others when the sheets fall.
I think this article is really actually helpful and its good that its out there to assist people who may not have the means to have their own pickup truck. A lot of the strategies are things I would not have really thought of myself and I think they’re good to keep in mind for sure! I must admit, I do find it a little funny that some of the tips still lead back to trucks such as renting a truck or renting a trailer. Almost as if to say, “Don’t have a truck? Pfft just get one temporarily bozo.” Nevertheless, these tips are still really nice and they do help a lot. I didn’t know you could cut plywood at the store, so this is actually really good to know as I don’t think the stores express this so openly. Then again, I rarely shop for plywood so I don’t really know that for sure, I could just be uninformed.
I have luckily had the benefit of friends with trucks when I’ve needed to transport plywood thus far, but it is always good to know that there are alternatives when I am left to my own devices. A problem I have with some of these solutions is that they require certain circumstances such as the need for plywood not needing to be a full sized sheet. A last resort is just carrying the plywood to where you need it to be, but this can be dangerous depending on how far and in what conditions you would have to walk. One of the things I have always said in regards to buying cars is that I want a truck with a large enough bed for a sheet of Ply. If in the future I can purchase such a truck, having it will increase the amount of home renovation projects I am able to take up.
I have gone to Home Depot before and bought large sticks of lumber with no plan to get them home. I was able to get them home without much hassle but it was still quite a challenge at first to figure out how I would transport it and where it would fit or cause a huge disturbance. This is a consistent problem for a lot of people my age as I have seen many photos or heard stories of how people walked their lumber all the way from a home store back to their work site. I think some of these insights are super important for people that haven’t taken advantage of them yet. The most critical one in my opinion is using the resources available at the store to make it more manageable. Cutting it down to size in store both saves you the time doing it later and makes it easier for you to transport home. Some people might not have been aware that this is a service that is offered by most home stores but one they do it is an invaluable resource for transportation and time saving. I would love to read more about other ways that people have figured out how to get plywood home in cars or by hand.
Post a Comment