Shopping at Owl Lumber

Liz and I were up early today, as we were looking to hit up several places in the suburbs. Our main goal: to go to Owl Lumber and find enough Vertical Grain Doug Fir for some window jambs (Bob is making custom window frames for a few of our windows).

I had called ahead to a few places, but we had all three locations mapped out… just in case.

Checking out some the inventory at the Des Plaines location (probably the best stocked location of them all).

Spent a lot of time hauling pieces out (slowly) to go through several boards.

Pro: we didn’t end up needing to cut many boards at all (and only had to cut one board down to fit into our car).

Con: we needed the passenger seat down, which meant Liz had to sit in back.

In total, we went to the Des Plaines location (got two boards), then drove over to Rockler (for some gel stain), then drove over to the Lombard location. At Lombard, we realized we were better off going back to Des Plaines and buying their larger boards.

We were trying to reduce the waste/cutoff… but the best option overall ended up having us get the boards at Des Plaines. Could have saved ourselves a bit of time, but we kinda had to do what we did.

Related:
Paint and Shellac
Garden Box Construction, Part 1
Woodworking 101 at Rebuilding Exchange