The soft variety bends easily for curved furniture and stair railings. Maple's pale color, lively graining and fine texture combine with strength to make it an excellent choice for furniture, cabinets, paneling, doors, molding and flooring, including stair treads. Ash stains beautifully, but if you're looking for a smooth, glassy surface, you'll need to fill the characteristic open pores with pore filler before finishing the piece. Because the wood is hard, you'll need to drill pilot holes for your screws and nails. Although stiff, it's easy to work with both hand and power tools it doesn't wear down saw blades much more than softer woods. Because it bends very well with steaming, ash is ideal for curved furniture, trim and crafts. It's a coarse-textured wood with strength comparable to oak, but because it's less dense, ash is easier to work with. In its less active life, the strength and rich, creamy color of white ash make it a popular choice for furniture. Many of them probably sport handles made from ash.
If you're more handy than athletic, check out your hand tools. This shock-resisting wood is also known for its ability to deliver slap-shots in chilly ice arenas, sink snooker balls in smoky parlors and navigate a thrilling whitewater run. Kiln-dried, turned and clear-coated, white ash becomes the driving force of line-drives and grand slams in America's pastime, baseball. Since buying locally makes sense environmentally and economically, we'll also look at where each type of wood grows. In this article, we'll look at the qualities and uses of five sustainable hardwoods. They must document the journey of the lumber from forest to retail shelves with a chain-of-custody paper trail to prove that the wood was harvested legally from a certified sustainable forest. But lumber producers must do even more to earn FSC certification for their products. The harvesters also take pains to reduce the impact of the harvest by maintaining a buffer of trees around waterways and reseeding areas damaged by the lumbering equipment. Sustainable hardwoods are harvested from forests managed to maintain a natural balance of tree and plant diversity. The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) recognizes more than 100 million acres (40,468,564 hectares) of forest in the United States and Canada that are managed to its environmental and social standards. Irresponsible logging leads to deforestation, pollution of waterways from erosion runoff, and the removal of a major resource in the carbon cycle - a whole forest of oxygen-producing, carbon dioxide-absorbing trees.įortunately, some of the hardwoods most popular for home improvement and woodworking projects are now grown and harvested sustainably, often domestically. Harvesting that much wood can have devastating effects on forests and surrounding environments.