Lumber - Home Building Materials

Lumber is a building material that is used to build homes and other buildings. The picture below represents a variety of different types of lumber used in the construction industry. Lumber comes in a variety of different shapes and sizes and is primarily used for framing building structures.

What Does Lumber Come From?

The first step of the process is to cut a large tree down and then transport the tree to a lumber mill. The lumber mill will cut the tree into a variety of different sizes. After the lumber has been cut and shaped to be desired lengths it will be packaged and shipped to a lumber yard.

Stairway Stringer Tip: When selecting lumber that's going to be used for your stair stringers, make sure that you select a premium grade of lumber. There's a good chance that you won't be removing over one third of a floor joist or roofer rafter, like you would, cutting a notched stair stringer.

It's vital to the construction of the stairway, to have the best piece of lumber available, if possible. If you're going to be building an exterior stairway out of wood, you're also going to be dealing with the elements.

Lumber that gets wet will expand and when it dries it will shrink. This only increases the possibility of structural failure. I've seen large knots fall out of stair stringers and large cracks from sun damage, within a relatively short period of time.

It isn't long, before the stairway needs to be replaced. The money that it will cost to replace the stairway in a few years, could have been invested into a different type of lumber or a better grade. This isn't going to be the case all ways, but should be considered during the design, of the stairway.

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