Plywood Grading - Building Lumber

Plywood grading provides us with different types of plywood that can be used for a variety of different home building and construction applications. Plywood is usually graded by the amount of knots and imperfections that can be seen on the surface. The picture below provides you with a plywood grading stamp that can be viewed by a building inspector and other construction workers.

Interior Plywood

Interior plywood can be used on the inside of the building and shouldn't be used on the outside of the building. This type of plywood is usually used for furniture making and cabinets. It's rarely used for framing or building homes, because of its potential moisture problems. If the roof wasn't installed and it started to rain, a interior grade plywood could start to delaminate.

Exterior Plywood

Exterior plywood is the most common plywood used in the construction industry. It uses a special glue that will usually prevent the plywood from falling apart, if it ever got wet. I've even witnessed exterior grade plywood's delaminate and fall apart, when exposed to more than a few weeks of rain.

To avoid something like this from happening to you, you should try to protect as much of the home as possible, while the home is being constructed. One of the best ways to accomplish this is to get the roof on or cover the roof with roofing paper, as soon as possible.

Structural Plywood

Structural plywood is designed to provide structural engineers with a stronger grade of plywood. You can usually find the word structural or struct, when examining the lumber grading stamp on these types of plywood.

There are other types of plywood's, but they're rarely used in the home building our construction industry.

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