7. How do you select the woods for your furniture?

The National Hardwood Lumber Association establishes uniform rules for grading hardwoods, including a requirement that a given percentage of a board be usable if cut into pieces of a certain minimum width and length. The higher the grade, the higher the usable percentage must be and the larger the size of the cuttings.

The top two grades are usually combined and sold as Firsts and Seconds (FAS) or they may be combined with the next lower grade, Select, and marketed as “Select and Better”. It is not unusual for the highest grades of lumber to be as much as three times as expensive as the lowest. At McKinnon, we only purchase FAS. This ensures that we are making your furniture using the best grade of materials available.

Working from this high quality material, our craftspeople select the wood for each piece of furniture, carefully trying to match color and grain. Because we make our furniture to order and we don’t inventory components, the wood for each piece is hand selected for that piece.

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