Reply To: Wood purchasing – Hull Humberside East Yorkshire
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You are not alone in facing this challenge with finding wood and viewing it before purchase. I have not yet found a very good solution either in the UK near me (Reading), only compromises. I’m also interested in any good answers here.
In my experience, B&Q wood is good for almost nothing except learning how to foursquare it again. As annoying as that is, it can, ironically, be a good lesson to learn. I now credit any stock preparation skill I have jointly to Paul Sellers and B&Q – thanks for the extra practise B&Q!
B&Q’s Planed All Round (PAR) wood – often recommended for beginners as “easier to get started with” – is a bad joke. Anything over 5cm wide will be severely cupped to a level where to flatten it means loosing ~2/3rds of the thickness and it’s already expensive. Even if you are lucky enough to get the one square piece they have each year, you will still need to plane it anyway to smooth it as the machine planers rarely produce a good enough result.
The best bet with B&Q IMO is to go for rough sawn, kiln dried (or sometimes CLS if they have any in that looks good), because you will have to square, flatten and smooth it anyway like the PAR and it’s quite a bit cheaper and you lose less thickness from what you buy. The downside is that you will be limited mainly to miscellaneous “whitewood”. That’s OK though for beginners, provided you are happy to learn to prepare the stock and not just wanting to learn/practise joinery techniques.
Sometimes Wickes has better stock, but not by much.
I agree, many general timber merchants can be quite unwelcoming. Most are geared up for tradesmen buying standard list stock for building and not interested in someone who wants to have a look at what there is and get in the way of their forklifts loading up the white vans etc.
Google Paul’s blog post on sourcing wood. He recommends ebay and places like Scawton sawmill which take telephone orders and also internet orders now. Quality is supposed to be good, but unfortunately you may still not see what you get until it arrives and places like scawton will only ship orders of 5 – 10 board feet which may be WAY too much for some people to store/digest/afford at once, especially beginners just trying their hand.
Ebay could be good for getting random one-off hardwood boards and you get pictures at least, but you may be stung for postage as hardwood tends to be heavy!
There are some smaller specialist timber places, that will let you look and buy small quantities of hardwoods e.g. one board. In my case they are always annoyingly far away, but I do hope someone can advise you somewhere close to you!