I wish I had a truck

When it comes to tools and supplies, I haven’t met a woodworker yet who doesn’t look for bargains. I’m no different, and boy have I found a bargain. In spite…

When it comes to tools and supplies, I haven’t met a woodworker yet who doesn’t look for bargains. I’m no different, and boy have I found a bargain.

In spite of the fact that I live in the middle of nowhere, I have five big-box home centers near me – three blue ones and two orange ones – and I regularly make the circuit when I’m out and about just to see what they have. The other day I went to one specifically to get a couple small pieces of Western red cedar. I generally don’t bother looking at anything over 8’ long, since that’s the limit I can jam into my car. And as I’m sifting through the short stuff, a bright yellow CLEARANCE sticker on the 10’ rack caught my eye.

For some reason, they were getting rid of the bigger stuff. The 10’ 1x6s were cheaper than the 8’ 1x6s. Now I don’t mean they were cheaper per foot, which is normal when buying larger sizes, I mean that a 10’ board was cheaper than an 8’ board – about $3.50 cheaper. Same thing for the 1x8s and 1x10s, except the savings were even greater per board. So I did what any self-respecting woodworker would do: I checked my wallet to see how much I could get without having to miss a utility payment.

Unfortunately, what I could get wasn’t as much as I’d have liked. So I got what I could, had them cut those 10-footers to a size I could get into the car, and headed home with my goodies. (Note: Driving home with a carload of freshly sawn cedar is positively intoxicating.) Unloading my prize and carrying it to the shop (which is now, likewise, aromatically intoxicating), I whined to myself that I couldn’t have gotten more.

That was Wednesday. Flash forward to Thursday, when my friendly mailman brought a check I’d been waiting for. Now, my mail arrives late in the day, and I unfortunately had too much to do to go running off to the store to buy every piece of cedar they had.

But it’s Friday, and I’ve been a good boy all morning taking care of a lot of work. Last thing on my list is to write a blog. In exactly one more sentence, even that task can be scratched off the to-do list.

So, guess where I’m going now.

Till next time,

A.J.

 A.J. Hamler is the former editor of Woodshop News and Woodcraft Magazine. He's currently a freelance woodworking writer/editor, which is another way of stating self-employed. When he's not writing or in the shop, he enjoys science fiction, gourmet cooking and Civil War reenacting, but not at the same time.