Shopping for Building Materials

Some random thoughts and stories about shopping for lumber.

Buying lumber is not that different from buying music. 

You can shop at the big anonymous self-service store with lots of choice (Home Depot/ITunes).   Or you can go to the locally-owned more personal store (Hayward Lumber, Do Re Mi Music.)

I buy lumber both ways.  Also music. 

When we need 2x4s or sheets of plywood or treated 4x4s for posts in the ground, I go to either Home Depot in Seaside or Hayward Lumber in Pacific Grove.  It depends on what I need and how I want to get it. 

At Home Depot it can be a little cheaper, but it’s a giant store among other giants stores, and the quality varies from day to day. I park in the giant lot, and find a big cart to load the lumber on, navigate it to the right aisles, pick out the boards myself from the big stacks, eyeball each 2x4 to make sure it’s straight and not too murchy, load them on the cart, each board with its own bar code stapled on the end, navigate the big aisles with the heavy cart, wait in line with lots of contractors, load it in my car myself, return the cart. 

Or I go to Hayward Lumber, old time locally owned yard in a neighborhood right next to Asilomar Beach, maybe stop at the beach on my way home.  A little pricier, but better quality stuff.  I park right in front, go into the office and place my order and pay first.  Then I drive with the purchase order into the yard where the yard guys are mostly loading up huge orders for contractors, hundreds of 2x4s.  You can’t pick out your own boards, so I try to talk the yard guys into picking out good boards for me. I casually refer to what we are building (this is going to be for a new deck in Palo – oh you live in Palo, do you know….)  Or I try to act cool and knowledgeable and drop a few insider terms (“We’re using these for joists for our new addition”) so they will be impressed that a woman knows this stuff.  They usually do pick out nice boards for me, probably out of pity.  Then they load it in the car, no one can load their own car (insurance?).   I keep the slip to show it to the old guy who sits at the exit to prove I paid.

When I leave Home Depot I’m a little wiped out, like I have survived an ordeal.  I drive away from Hayward Lumber a little hopeful and inspired and proud of myself.  And with a little less money.  It’s a trade off. 

This is not too different from buying a CD.  I can peruse the endless selections on line, and have it arrive right now, or tomorrow in the mail.  Or I can go by Do Re Mi Music in Carmel, owned by two aging hippies who also sell guitars and DVDs of obscure musicals movies and are a font of music and movie trivia.  And perhaps a dying breed.  Another reason I like to support them. 

Lots of my neighbors order everything from Amazon.  I know because we all share a community locked package box at the mailboxes on the paved road, and I see their giant boxes in there. Living on the remote Big Sur coast complicates delivery of products and services.  Nothing can be dropped at our doorstep.  From the mail boxes and community box we all drive home on bad dirt roads.  We have mediocre internet.  Package delivery and streaming are a little iffy.  Another reason to patronize the locals.

But I don’t think Amazon sells lumber.  I’ve never seen boards in or beside the community box and there are lots of builders in my canyon.  Only a matter of time, I expect.

A few years ago when we replaced our roof I put so many charges for plywood and 2x4s and insulation on my credit card that some builder’s magazine solicited my subscription with a flattering come-on about how such a great builder like myself would enjoy learning from other master builders. 

I was so amused at the idea of me as a great builder that I ordered the magazine at the intro rate for a year.  But it was sort of like soft porn – beautiful pictures of something I could never get that left me feeling a little inadequate.  I let it expire. 

We recently rebuilt an old woodshed into a workshop and we vowed to use only materials we had around, buy nothing new.  No trips to Home Depot or Hayward Lumber.  Which was hard.  We realized, sort of like the (also fading) pleasure of going to bookstores, the shopping itself is pleasurable, especially talking with the workers.  We missed that.

But we did have fun building just with scraps and creativity. Admittedly it was nothing that would appear in the master builder magazine.  Which was fine with us. 

There’s a time for buying and a time for building.  And you actually can do one without the other.  Both are fun, but require different skills.  If I had to choose one, I’d go for building. 

Copyright © 2016 Deborah Streeter