“Welcome to the Cambium Café! May I take your order?”
“Yes, I’d like 2.3125 pounds of sustenance.”
“Oooo. Excellent choice sir. And how would you like that sustenance?”
“Let’s see. I’d like 8 ounces of grilled protein, 17 ounces of starch, fried. And 12 ounces of steamed vegetable matter.”
“You got it.”
That’s not how we order food. And it’s not how I buy wood.
I can honestly say, with my hand on my duodenum, that I have never walked into a lumberyard and said: “I would like 19.17 board feet of cherry. Ope, I almost forgot to allow for 20 percent waste. So I’ll actually need 23.004 board feet.”
When I make chairs or one-off pieces, I pick every stick of wood. I don’t think about board feet until the clerk rings up my order (and I Kegel just a little to ensure I don’t crap myself).
So when people ask: “How many board feet do I need to build a stick chair?” I don’t have a good answer. You can order 500 board feet of lumber and manage to get only one chair out of that pile of wood because the gr…
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The American Peasant to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.