Stacking Lumber

Almost done with this lumber for a while.  It's pretty crucial to get the milled lumber stacked and stickered to get air on all surfaces and drying out pretty quickly otherwise, especially with poplar and other rot susceptible woods, you'll start getting all kinds of fungi eating up your wood and probably ending up causing some issues in your final structure.

Since I had various lengths of lumber from 8' to 16' I decided to go with a 24' length stack so I could combine lengths in the layers and still end up even.  I laid down a 12' by 24' billboard (from billboardtarps.com) to make sure I didn't have any moisture, plants coming up from the ground and that any water that made it under the pile should easily drain downhill.

I laid out the end bolsters, got them both level, then pulled a taught string between their ends to get a rough idea of what I'd need to do to get the others level and in plane.  I got all the bolsters laid out at 4' spacing.

Next I carefully started laying down the first boards to make sure I wouldn't shift the bolsters.  These were very wide 1" thick boards, grain matched, to ultimately be the inner wall and ceiling finish.  I put them down first because they are the most likely to warp and cup and I wanted them to have the weight of the rest of the pile on them to keep that from happening.  I toe-screwed through the sides of the boards on the sides of the pile so I could start walking on top of them without worry about shifting things around.

I then screwed  the very ends of the boards through the stickers and into the bolsters.  This helped me in working alone so that I could drag one end of the board off the trailer and across the pile without screwing up the spacing on the stickers.  You want to make sure your stickers are directly above each other so that the weight doesn't cause the lumber to bend.

A couple more layers of 1" by...

Then on to the 2 x 4s and 3 x 4s to be used for framing.  I decided to stack them on edge, as opposed to face, because it's it's easier to straighten out a bend in thickness, than a bow in width.  Also with framing it's much more important to have no bow, otherwise your wall will have bulges.

Next, the 1x quarter sawn hardwood and the wider 2 x stuff that would maybe be used for subfloor or floor joists for the greenhouse/utility shed.

Then the larger 6 x lumber that should have minimal bending and bowing because Isak "boxed their hearts" quite well and the last layer of stickers.

Finished it all up by headlight in a little sprinkling of rain and threw a 12' x 24' billboard tarp over the whole thing.

I came back a few days later to work on proper roofing.  With lots of heavy stuff on top.  Sigghhhhh.

The roofing later blew off with some of our crazy winds so I used the ratchet straps that had loosened on the poplar bark, because it had dried out, to really secure the roofing.  So far, so good.  The next time I'll be dealing with this lumber will be to load it into the trailer structure that will serve as a Solar kiln.  I'm also planning to put in a dehumidifier on a thermostat, to aid in the drying process.