I am truely amazed at the price of solid wood furniture. It’s incredible how expensive it is. A bookcase like this one sells on crazy discount for $285. Normally the thing is MSRP of $642. I’m no polished craftsman, but I feel very safe in saying that thing has no more than $80 worth of raw material in it.

I picked up 65 board feet of 4/4 Red Oak in varying widths (between about 6 and 14 inches wide) for less than that book case. I could probably build three of those with the amount of wood sitting on my lumber rack in the garage. Bookcases are pretty easy pieces to build. Just make sure the rips are straight, oversize them if necessary, and plane them down once assembled. That or run them through an edge jointer of some type (see next post)….

But seriously, 65 board feet of 4/4 is a lot of wood. Linearly it’s over 80 feet of varying widths, which is fine since I’ll be ripping most of it down to 2″ strips for stiles and rails on the cabinet doors. I’ve got way more wood than I need, which is fine by me. I got a sizeable board foot discount at 50′, so going to 65′ was prudent. I’ll use it… I’ve got plans for what to do with the remainder after I finish the cabinet doors. Those wide, 14″ beasts are going to be very usefull.

Oh, and for those of you that care, Northwest Lumber Co. is a great place to buy wood.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 17th, 2007 at 10:52 am and is filed under Core Dump, Woodworking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.