European Softwood at H.D.

I would have guessed you to be older...you're pretty sharp for a youngster. Anyway, I once heard that if you lived in a part of the country where black walnut grew well, you could plant one for each newborn child, and one tree would put one child through college when the time came. Used for veneer.

Eighty-five acres of 40 year old trees ought to make you a rich man. Good luck.

All the best, Stan

Hard wood and hardwood (and soft wood and softwood) don't mean the same thing. Coniferous trees are softwood, by definition. I think hardwoods are broad leaf by definition. Oak, maple, hickory, apple, cherry, alder, are all harder than fir, hemlock, cedar, or pine, but mahogany, balsa, and cottonwood are hardwoods, too (unless I'm wrong, in which case they aren't.)

Doug fir used to be the lumber standard in the Pacific NW, but it's rare and expensive now. For years (decades, actually) the standard framing lumber here has been hem/fir---just crap. Splintery, splits if you look at it hard, stinks when you cut it, riddled with suspiciously small knots. It's what you get, I think, when you plant fast growing trees, and harvest them when they're six inches in diameter. It took a lot of the enjoyment out of remodeling for me. Oh, wait...it wasn't bad lumber, it was the arthritis. The lumber isn't the only thing that was better when I was young.

All the best, Stan

US are companies still too concerned with bottom
line& US Forest Service isn't putting out as many sales as was once done.

It seems hard to believe that they can import lumber from Europe and still make money on it. I suppose it isn't subject to the same tariffs as lumber from Canada, but you would think the exchange rate and transportation costs would make it prohibitively expensive.

I'm just happy when I can get decent lumber, I don't much care where it comes from.

BTW, if you wonder why you can't find good lumber at the lumberyard even though we're cutting down the last of the old-growth fir, all that stuff has been going to Japan for years. They ship whole logs over there; the Japanese don't want American sawmills to touch this stuff; it's far too valuable.