The cheapest way to buy lumber is green and rough cut from a sawmill in your area. 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. The only alternative will be by purchasing dried lumbers from home improvement shops , that is if you have a lot of money but personally I'd like mine rough cut and prepared by me.

As soon as you have decided a the project you want to do and the kind of lumber you need, the next step is getting your materials. If you go directly to a sawmill they will let you go around pick your choice of lumber. Getting a bit oversized lumber is advisable if you are picking the green lumber because it will shrink when dried.You should find that the price you pay here will be very good, so don't try to haggle the price down. If they like you and you become a repeat customer they will probably give you even better deals later on.

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After you get your lumber home, you'll need to decide on how you will dry it. In drying your lumbers all you need to do is pile them up make sure that there is around 12"-24" space between each other and it is dried under the sun but is covered from the rain, this is process is usually known as ' Air Drying" It takes a year to dry a 1" thick board so if you have 2" it will take 2 years etc... A lumber can b allowed to dry inside the workshop after a year because it usually has 12%-18% moisture therefore it is not yet ready to be used.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.

One other method for drying a green lumber is by the use of solar kiln . There are a lot of solar kiln plans online. Building it will only cost you around $200. 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.

You can start processing the lumber as soon as its dried up. First thing you have to do is joint one face of the panel. This can be accomplished manually with a hand plane or perhaps the easy approach by having a jointer. You may now cut it in close to the dimensions that you need. And then you can run the lumber through the thickness planer. This will make the board parallel to the flat face. Once you plane the panel down to your final size, afterwards you joint one edge perhaps by yourself or by using a jointer. With the board flat, planed to the final thickness you are ready to rip the board to your final width. You can use any kind of saw to do this. Make sure that you are able to set the edge guide by using the jointed edge for reference. You're now almost ready to have a board for your project. You're done, and you saved tons of money by processing the rough boards yourself.