How to Avoid Moldy Lumber When Building | Ep. 47

And why is this happening in such a prevalence today versus homes that were built 50 or 100 years ago? It has something to do with one lumber quality today.

So if you look at the lumber that was used in older homes, maybe you've even done a renovation of a home 50 years old, you will notice there is a significant quality difference in older lumber versus lumber that's used today.

So some say it has to do with the quality of lumber that we're using today.

If you take a piece of lumber from a home even built 50, 60 years ago, it's stronger.

It's much more dense.

You can see the rings on that dimensional lumber that it's much tighter.

The grain is tighter.

It's not nearly as soft as the lumber that's being used today.

We used to cut down trees in natural forest-grown regions.

Now we are using farmed trees.

They're grown much faster.

The lumber's often softer.

The rings are not as tighter.

That certainly has some layer of aspect to it that just lumber quality and lumber species is just entirely different in what we're using today but the other aspect is that a lot of the lumber is even showing up to the job site already with visible mold on it some call it lumberyard mold i don't know the difference between lumberyard mold and actual harmful mold so The only way to actually know is to test it.

Now, would I prefer to test a two by six piece of lumber or would I prefer to just reject it, send it back and get a new piece that's clean? It's going to be more cost effective to actually reject lumber than to go through a whole testing process.

So one has to do with the lumber quality that we're getting today.

We're not using a lot of forest grown lumber today.

because of what we've already gone through and the rapid rate at which we're building and needing lumber the other aspect has to do with lumber quality so there are different grades of lumber there's different quality there's even different moisture content of lumber so one exercise you could do if you went to a big box hardware store today and you went to their lumber aisle you will see that there is even in the 2x4 section you'll see very visually different lumber.

Like if you go on the two by four aisle, you will see two by fours and they have two little letters after it.

KD, that's for kill and dried.

That means it's dried lumber.

Then you will see two by fours that do not have KD after it.

that's often referred to as green lumber meaning that it's not gone through a kiln it's not dried if you step back and look at these two stacks of lumber you can visually see the stack that's green lumber it's not actual green it looks like regular lumber but that's how it's referred to as it is visually wet you can see it's wet lumber.

Now, if you look at the KD lumber, kill and dried, it's dry.

It's dry.