Buying a lumber can be quite costly sometimes so it is best if you buy it straight from the source and while it is still green. Your home improvement projects will need to wait for a while if these is the lumber you have intended to use, because this lumber needs to be dried out first. I love using products that I personally made myself but if you have a lot of money to spend and you are in a hurry you can just purchase the lumbers you need in any home improvement shops.

Once you decide what projects you are going to attempt, and what species you plan to use, you can begin the process. The first thing you need to do is procure the materials. If you go directly to a sawmill they will let you go around pick your choice of lumber. But remember this, "green lumber will shrink while drying!" So make sure you pick stock that is a little over sized.It will not be necessary to haggle the price of the lumber since the prices here are already discounted but if you are frequent customer they might give you better deal

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Drying the lumber will be the next thing you would want to do after bringing it home. Air drying is on of the ways to dry you green lumber this is done by piling your boards directly under the sun but protected from the rain For each 1" thick lumber , it will take you a year to dry so if you have 2" thick it will take 2 years 3" 3 years and so on. After they air-dry the moisture content will be around 12%-18%, this is still to wet to work with, so now you can bring the lumber inside your shop to finish drying.If your shop has low humidity you can let your lumber finish drying for a few weeks in there. I suggest that you buy a thermometer/hygrometer from Radio Shack. It is only about $40 and you can buy remote sensors for it to monitor other areas. The humidity in your shop should be under 50%RH to allow your lumber to finish drying down to 8% moisture content.

The other method of drying is to build a solar kiln. Plans for solar kilns can be found on the internet. These kilns can be built for only a couple hundred dollars. You can place your green lumber inside the kiln to begin drying. To dry the lumbers you need to leave it inside the kiln for approximately 1-2 months for it to be ready for use. However it will often times depend on your location, the season and etc.

After your lumber is dried you can begin processing it. First thing you must do is joint one face of your plank. This can be accomplished by hand using a hand plane or perhaps the easy approach with a jointer. You may now cut it in close to the dimensions that you need. After you have one face flat you then run the board through a thickness planner. This is for you to have an equal thickness . As soon as you plane the board down to your final dimension, you then joint one edge either by yourself or by making use of a jointer. As soon as the board is planed you can now cut it to the final width. You can do this with a table saw, band saw, or even a skill saw with an edge guide. Make sure that you are able to set the edge guide by using the jointed edge for reference. After you have cut the final measurement you can now start building your project. You will really save a lot of money by processing your own boards for your projects