> Even the quality of lumber has decreased as old growth forests that were harvested 80 years ago no longer exist. Heart pine lumber that were used in 1940s homes (I own one) is more dense and stronger than new growth pine lumber. [1]
I'm a woodworker and I've also owned a property management company and done my own home's remodeling (the kind of remodel that means you talk to structural engineers). What you say is true, in some ways and with asterisks. It is also irrelevant. New growth pine is preposterously strong when loaded in the correct dimensions and balloon- and platform-framed houses are designed to do exactly that.
Modern silviculture is an absolute marvel. It turns out prodigious amounts of more-than-good-enough material at remarkably cheap prices.
To the average consumer who might buy a few 2x4's a year from Home Depot there has been a marked change though. 20 years ago you could get reasonable quality dimensional lumber and plywood from your average big box home improvement store. Nowadays that's practically impossible. Where I'm at, I've had to resort to going to lumber yards to get what I used to be able to get from Home Depot years ago -- the big box store's stuff is rarely even close to being dry and maybe 1/20 2x4's are anything resembling straight.
Your average framing contractor is going to already buying from a lumber yard most likely, so they haven't seen that change, but in the consumer space it's been noticeable.
If you move a few bays over from the unnamed or explicitly listed as “whitewood” (usually a poplar) 2 x 4 to actual pine/fir/spruce, the quality returns. Recently they cost only two more dollars. Whitewood is fine for supporting most hobby loads. It’s not meant to build a house. It will happily act as a French Cleat, frame some shelving, or serve as a jig.
Buying from lumber yards also matters due to grading and various standards builders have to abide by that weekend warriors do not.
What area are you from? I have never seen or heard of a big box store selling 2× poplar. I am also surprised to hear that the poplar 2×s are cheaper than pine. For hobbyist woodworking I think poplar is preferable to pine everyday.
I think it depends on what you want whether poplar or pine are better, tbh. Poplar's very stable, it's great if you want to paint it, and it does take some machining (chiefly routing) a little nicer, but I personally really like the grain of pines and firs quite a lot compared to the weird greens/purples of conventionally available poplars.
Both are soft enough that you can't really beat them up.
So I mean, I'm from New England, and maybe this is just a cultural thing, but I think that well-treated pine looks really nice - a golden hue from an oil-based finish, plus pretty brown knots. I don't love the table design here, live edge isn't my thing, but this wood looks great to me: https://cswoods.com/products/eastern-white-pine-dining-table...
But you can get nice grain out of other softwoods, too. Because it's very easy to get hold of here, I use white fir sometimes in furniture. Not "fine" furniture, but simple house stuff. This tabletop was actually the first thing I ever did in my shop and while it hasn't held up amazingly (my breadboards popped and I haven't fixed them yet) I quite like it for what it is as a learner messing around, more or less, and the sap intrusion along the breadboard still makes me happy when I see it: https://i.imgur.com/nipUhLs.jpg
Thanks, worth the explanation! Would have been self-explanatory with something like "little more that" added, but having it right in there would ruin the joke, as integrated explanations tend to.
It's the same experience here for those kinds as well. Part of the problem is that I'm on the US west coast, so most of the wood in our stores is probably somewhere from the PNW and thus from more or less the same lumber companies no matter the kind.
It certainly might be the case, or you might not even be getting the same stuff - I did some looking around and apparently people in British Columbia are having trouble getting local Douglas fir because it's all getting shipped out east.
Agreed with this - the Home Depot stuff I’ve looked at is often warped or cracked. The prices they ask for it make me put my DIY projects off till next summer.
Not from what I've seen at the retail end. They're certainly not at their crazy peak prices from that one May, but they're still much higher than even a few years ago, and have not been decreasing commensurate with the futures. Especially if you start to consider a quality/$ measure; For example, I used to be able to buy lumber that was ready to use. Now I _have_ to give it time to air dry because it's too wet to work with immediately despite being 'kiln dried'. That's time and additional preparation I have to do, not to mention have the room to allow it to air dry. I can imagine that being a pain if you needed a 2x4 for some small project in a small apartment.
anecdotes are not data, which is what the parent poster supplied.
i'd imagine the averages are down across the country but that doesn't mean things are cheaper everywhere, esp. if you're in a high COL area and they know you can pay
I once got some used wood for free from Craigslist…somebody gave away his fathers old scraps.
One piece was a 2x4 from 1982, from RONA (a Canadian store) and it a very beautiful piece of pine. It was exactly 2” by 4”, and straight grain. Obviously it was air-dried by then :)
Now it might have been from the select pine section of the store, not SPF construction lumber.
Pine ought to be treasured, not tested as a garbage wood like we do nowadays. If it were scarce it would be priceless.
I don't know about "treasured", but pine is nice! The main thing is that it's soft. Furniture made from pine will dent if you look at it. My coffee table is something I made early on when I was learning and it's made of white fir, which isn't far off mechanically from pine; the grain lines are dramatic when stained and it looks really cool, but you have to baby it similar to a white pine.
I am a big fan of ash, but the bugs are going to make that very hard to source going forward.
This claim doesn't make sense. Every store I've seen in the last five years includes nominal sizing of their dimensional lumber (which, for a 2x4, is generally a quarter off on every side, not an eighth)--and if you are buying dimensional lumber for its dimensions other than length, you either know what you're doing (I buy 2x8s and mill them sometimes) or you're doing it wrong.
Your experience is certainly possible, but it's also localized. It also depends on what you bought. Both big-box stores in my area have two different kinds of 2x4s. Both have "whitewood studs" and both carry a flavor of hem-fir. The latter are a little more expensive. They're also generally much straighter and easier to work with. If you buy "whitewood" you will probably be full of regrets, but if you don't buy the cheapest thing on the rack you can do OK.
That said, unless you are framing a wall I think that the real key for dimensional lumber is to forget that 2x4s exist. Big-box stores start giving you much, much more uniform material once you get up to 2x6s. While I work in hardwoods sometimes, I like making simple furniture and gifts out of softwood because of the regularity, the price, and because I don't care nearly as much if I make mistakes. My primary materials are 2x6s and 2x8s from my local Lowe's and Home Depot (because my jointer can't handle anything bigger). Lowe's are Idaho-sourced white fir and Home Depot are unknown-source Douglas fir. They both make pretty decent 1" x 5" milled boards, for the most part. Knots in white fir open and crack in interesting ways that give it a rustic feel that I like, but the color is pale and weird (so I break out stain for most of those projects, shhh don't tell). In other parts of the country you can get stuff like the southern yellow pines (slash pine most common), which have interesting properties as they age with regards to strength. Though I think they're kinda ugly.
I will tell you for sure, however, that the stuff you're buying is dry. It's just not dry to what you think it is. Dimensional lumber is dried to somewhere between 8% to 12%. That's dry enough to drive out most bugs and to reduce the future movement of the wood to the point where it can be safely and effectively constrained by fasteners--that is, while it may try to warp, it won't warp so much that it can potentially strain a fastener (which can absolutely happen, wood is strong). HD will not put lumber that is not adequately KD'd on the rack (barring accidents, etc.) because the stuff won't get signoff from builders, who absolutely do buy from HD and buy in bulk, and incurs liability. (Builders, at least where I am, do a lot less with lumber yards, because HD's prices are cheaper.) But 8% is the top end of what a furnituremaker or somebody making something that needs to be stable will expect; many aim for 6% moisture content, and that's in hardwoods which move a little less.
Plywood...is a different story, but plywood is having much bigger problems across the world right now. Again though, depending on where you are, you can do OK. My local Lowe's has adequate (not good) hardwood-veneered; my local HD has a "birch" ply that, while probably not entirely so, isn't awful. The bigger problem is that both are still ridiculously expensive, while both dimensional lumber and hardwoods have largely come back down in price.
It likely varies based on where you are in the world too.
Old pine sold her in New Zealand was full on knots and was pretty gnarly stuff. Anything I could buy now (except fencing timber) would be straighter and of more consistent dimensions.
I'm a woodworker and I've also owned a property management company and done my own home's remodeling (the kind of remodel that means you talk to structural engineers). What you say is true, in some ways and with asterisks. It is also irrelevant. New growth pine is preposterously strong when loaded in the correct dimensions and balloon- and platform-framed houses are designed to do exactly that.
Modern silviculture is an absolute marvel. It turns out prodigious amounts of more-than-good-enough material at remarkably cheap prices.