Order. ORDER!
Taming the all-mighty wood stack
What follows is a lengthy account of why stacking and storing lumber is so challenging. And then I offer up a few suggestions on how to make it more - but not entirely - manageable. ~JRC
Search for "wood storage solutions" online, and you'll find a plethora of nifty, neat, and tidy shelves, racks, and bins with size-sorted lumber. These seemingly ideal solutions make it look so, well, simple. But as with most of the real world, those pics of idealized lumber collections rarely manifest in life. Like everyone is not as beautiful as those Insta-worthy selfies suggest, no wood pile is ever as perfect as the ones we see on YouTube.
Rather than easy, managing and storing wood is the greatest challenge in organizing almost any wood shop. Lumber is a consumable collection that is continually accessed, used, modified, added to, and reorganized (or disorganized, as it were). This near-infinite array of quantities, sizes, and shapes constantly changes - befuddling nearly all who try to conquer it. But try we do, much to our never-ending frustration.
Take, as a simplified example, one-inch-thick poplar boards. These planks, or "sticks," as the pros call them, are relatively uniform, exceptionally true, and one of the most convenient types of lumber to store and use. Poplar planks keep beautifully, either flat-stacked or upright, the two most common ways lumber is stored. Indeed, A perfectly organized pile of poplar is the stuff from which a maker's dreams are born. But thinking it will stay neatly organized is indeed a dream.
Flat stacking poplar boards is wonderful - initially. Doing so keeps the sticks from warping, and we can store a lot of them this way. And since our poplar planks are mostly the same (reminder: this is just an example), one can easily take the top board when it's time for a project. But after a job or two, that once-uniform selection disintegrates into an unwieldy array of sizes that we must now deal with.Â
Flat stacking odd-lengthed pieces is possible, too, with a bit of brick-like arranging - place a row of shorter pieces together, top these with a longer length or two, add more short ones in a row, and so on. The result looks surprisingly organized, much like the original.Â
Except it's not.Â
When it's time to work again, we must dig into this revised stack and find the appropriate length. Too short will obviously not do, but using one that is too long only creates more oddball sizes and perhaps a lot of waste after cutting. No, there's the right-sized board in there somewhere, but where?Â
Good luck finding what you need in a flat stack.
The alternative is upright storage, and again, poplar is readily stored this way too. Many upright storage solutions entail bins or carts with varying cubbies for an assortment of lumber shapes and sizes. These configurations do work better than flat stacking when it comes to accessing the lumber. The lengths are discerned more quickly, and removing any particular board requires less work since we move fewer boards to grab the one we want.Â
With our poplar example, the number of cubbies need not be too many. One for full-length boards, perhaps another for half boards, and a few more for varying short and medium lengths. Easy enough, right?
But upright storage can cause longer lengths to warp over time. And worse still, such storage takes up a considerable amount of space. Even with our idealized, exclusively 1" poplar boards, upright storage easily doubles the space required over flat stacking.Â
In most shops, you'll find a combination of flat-stacked and upright lumber storage. And you'll find something else in most shops: more than simply 1" poplar boards. (As I repeatedly shared, this was only an example.) Various kinds of wood in a variety of shapes and sizes fill most woodshop stacks and bins. Plus unwieldy "sheet goods" like plywood complicate matters immensely. The latter come in varying thicknesses and many grades and wood veneers, making storing the sheets a true organizational nightmare.Â
But, as woodworkers and makers, we must deal. How I deal with my wood stack involves three (perhaps four) primary solutions. Well, not really solutions. These are more like triage in a never-ending cycle of disorder. But they help me manage the chaos, and perhaps they'll help you, too.
First, keep larger sheets of plywood and full-length boards in the least accessible locations.Â
An obvious reason for doing this is the big sheets and boards are the hardest to handle, and we don't want to be moving them around in search of smaller ones. As important, storing the big stuff out of the way entices us to peruse all the smaller pieces first in search of what we need (instead of being lazy and cutting into a virgin board or sheet). If we use wood close in size to what we make, there's less waste and fewer small pieces to deal with later.
I store my plywood on the top shelf of my stacks and whole boards along the back wall of each shelf. All the assorted smaller boards and planks are on lower shelves and in the front, roughly organized by material type and size. This layout helps me only reach for whole boards and sheets as a last resort.Â
Second, square up off-cuts and pieces while you work.Â
Inevitably, when working with wood, we make angled cuts, take wedges out of sheet stock, and occasionally make irregular cuts or holes in the material. What results are pieces that are difficult to store effectively and even more challenging to use later.Â
Instead of letting these one-offs accumulate, take some time and trim them to a storable and usable shape. Cut off dangling strips and square up edges. Doing so takes little time since you already have the saw out. This upfront effort makes slipping these pieces back into your stacks easier, so cleaning up after a project also goes more smoothly.
Third - and this is the most important - set time aside every few months to restack your stacks - totally.
Yes, I mean totally. Pull everything down, dust the wood off if possible, sort through sizes, and restack them as best possible. You've likely learned things you liked and didn't like about your past stacking, so this is the time to try something new. It also gives you a chance to take a rough inventory of what you have or need to get.
Why so frequently? Well, if you're like me, no amount of good intention keeps me stacking my wood neatly all the time. Inevitably, I get rushed and don't square up those boards like I just preached you should. And I am always stashing away odds and ends to keep my small space workable. After a few months of this wood stack slacking, a complete restacking is required.
I just finished doing it again this week. And the time before that was about six months ago, not long before starting on the mini-camper trailer build. (That build did a number on my wood stack, and I am only now recovering from the chaos.)
One final note (a fourth suggestion): be willing to let go of some pieces.Â
At some point, all the little chunks and bits can overwhelm, as there are few to no immediate uses for them. Some woodworkers have hard and fast rules to deal with these (e.g., anything under 12" gets scrapped). I find it hard to do so because I often make small things, and those pieces might come in handy - one day. Plus, recycling wood is challenging, especially engineered wood products like plywood, and I hate for it to end up in the landfill. But even the most diligent wood miser can't keep it all, and we have to use discretionary judgment on discarding some of the wood that weighs us down.
Wood stacks, like life, are always a work in progress. The ideal is never possible, and try as we might, no ingenuity, reorganizing, and from-the-ground-up reinventing will ever make them perfect. But we continue to try, and the more we learn and implement, the better that pile will be.
Until next time.
JRC