Stop Saying 'Best Quality': How to Order Timber the Way a Trade Buyer Does

Every few days someone comes through the door and asks for 'best quality oak, please'. It's a perfectly friendly thing to say, and it tells us almost nothing. Best quality for what? A stair handrail wants straight grain, tight knots and a moisture content that won't shrink under a coat of hard wax oil. A garden pergola wants durability and a bit of forgiveness in the grain, and it doesn't care in the slightest about a small sound knot halfway down. Give the pergola man the handrail board and you've wasted his money and ours.

The fix isn't complicated. It's a habit of ordering, and once you've got it you'll never go back to vague requests.

Lead with the job, not the species

The single most useful sentence you can say at a counter is what the timber is going to be part of.

• 'Internal window boards, painted, in a heated house.'
• 'Fence rails and a gate frame, fully exposed.'
• 'Worktop upstand, sanded and oiled, butt-jointed.'

That one line decides species, moisture content, grade and finish before anyone has mentioned a dimension. Species is usually the third question, not the first — but it's the one most people open with.

Then be specific about grade

Grade is where the money lives, and it's also where the misunderstandings happen. Grading isn't uniform across the trade — one man's 'joinery grade' is another man's 'character grade' — so describe what you'll accept in plain English:

• Small tight knots acceptable, or none at all?
• Sap allowed on the faces?
• Any shakes or splits tolerated, and if so, how far in from the end?
• Grain: straight, or is fig and character a plus?

A bench joiner specifying for a painted job will often take a lower grade than he assumed he needed, because paint hides it and the saving is real. A furniture maker wanting clear faces should say so, and expect to pay for the selection. Both are fine. Guessing is not.

Say the moisture content out loud

Most complaints about timber moving are really complaints about moisture, and most of those come from nobody mentioning it at the point of sale.

• Interior joinery and furniture in a heated building: roughly 8–12%.
• Exterior joinery, doors and windows: around 12–15%, and it will still move with the seasons.
• Cladding, fencing and garden structures: 15–18% is normal and fine.

If you're buying for an interior job, say 'kiln dried, around ten to twelve percent' and ask for a meter reading if you're unsure. Then let the stock acclimatise in the room where it's going before you machine it. That last bit costs you a week and saves you a callback.

Finished or rough? And what tolerance?

This is the one that catches out weekend builders and, occasionally, people who should know better. A '95 x 45' is not a '95 x 45' unless you say which one you mean.

• Rough sawn — actual size, surfaces not cleaned up. You'll lose a couple of millimetres all round when you machine it.
• Planed all round (PAR) — finished size, ready to work. This is what most people actually want when they ask for 95 x 45.
• Planed to a nominal size — say so, and accept that 95 x 45 PAR is machined from a larger rough section.

Then add the tolerance. A joiner making flush doors wants ±0.5mm and eased arrises. A carpenter building a shed wants ±2mm and doesn't care about the arris. If the job needs consistent thickness — cabinet doors, worktop joints, anything that sits in a rebate — say it, because it changes how the timber is selected and sometimes how it's priced.

Give a cutting list

The most welcome thing you can hand across a counter is a scrap of paper with lengths on it. It lets us work out how the lengths fall across the boards, which reduces waste and often reduces the price. Twelve 900mm pieces come out of 2.4m lengths with very little left over; ask for 3m and we'll all watch the same offcut pile grow.

Add a waste allowance — ten percent on straightforward joinery, more if you're grade-sensitive or working to tight tolerances. Nobody has ever regretted ordering slightly over. Plenty have regretted ordering exactly.

What a proper order looks like

12no. 2.4m lengths, European oak, joinery grade, kiln dried 10–12%, 95 x 45mm PAR, eased arris, tolerance ±0.5mm. For internal handrail and newels. Straight grain preferred, no sap on faces, 10% waste allowance.

Read that out and there are no questions left to ask. Everyone knows what's being cut, off which rack, and why.

What it saves you

Waste, mostly. Wrong-grade stock gets cut around, so you buy more than you need and throw away the difference. Wrong moisture gets machined, fitted and then shrinks, and you're back with a complaint and a second trip. Wrong tolerance means a whole run of components that don't go together, discovered on a Sunday evening.

Clear language also gets you a better price, though not in the way people expect. It isn't that we're feeling generous — it's that a specific order can be cut from stock that suits it, rather than from the nearest thing on the rack that's roughly the right species. Selection costs less than guesswork.

So next time you're ordering, skip 'best quality'. Tell us what it's for, what you'll accept, how dry it needs to be and what it has to measure when it's finished. You'll get the right board out the gate, and we'll both get on with our morning.