rail & stile wainscoting question

If you can't beat the BORGS linear foot prices for poplar at a hardwood lumber yard, you're not trying.

Unless you have a jointer and planer, even S2S1E poplar should be a lot cheaper, and all you need is a table saw with a good fence to "mill" it to your widths.

It absolutely is. In my area it's a 3x price difference.

It's WAY cheaper. See, for example:

It's probably cheaper to order the wood from the link above and have it shipped than to buy it at the Borg.

Josh

A lot of the wood I've seen in Home Despot is essentially rough sawn. The planer chatter is something unbelievable.

If you have the knowledge and equipment to mill your own stock, it's a far better way to go. I can't comment on how wood is priced in your area, but around here it would be cheaper to get the poplar from a hardwood house.

I have a new 8" jointer and 13" planer looking for a project!

Thanks everyone for the replies - I guess I need to get off my butt and check prices! My wood supplier deals in more specialty woods and not the type of bulk purchase I am going to need. (Not that its THAT much wood)

Get to work then ... you sure didn't buy those tools to mill BORG lumber. ;)

Nope - Thanks for your input. I have only bought more what I would call specialty lumber in furniture quantities. I guess my question was more about buying plain ole poplar in the rough. I'll go shopping and see what I can find.

As a kid being sent to the store with $5 to get some milk, you never came back with the milk and a Tootsie Roll?

ha

As someone who's been there, done that, let me suggest that (at very least) you opt to use MDF for the raised panels if not the rails & stiles as well. If, as you stated, you're going to paint this, the movement across the panels (and probably the rails & stiles) will cause splits in the painted surface.

I created "true" raised panel wainscoting for my dining room exclusively out of MDF. It was a lot of work and dusty, but two years later, there's still no seams where the MDF panels/rails/stiles have moved and split the paint.

Read the gory details along with pictures at:

As much as I hate MDF, I remember when you first posted the link to these pictures. I loved what you did and a second look today was just as good.

Thanks for the compliment (I wasn't fishing BTW). I've subsequently learned that there are some *very* nasty chemicals in MDF that make dust collection during routing imperative.

On a couple of projects Norm has done, he seems to favor poplar for the rails & stiles and MDF for the panels. My guess is he's concerned the rails/stiles won't route as "crisply" as poplar if they're MDF, but I had no complaints.

Thanks Woody - I am actually leanning to not raising panels at all. I think I will just do rails/styles base and cap with a 1/4 round in the frames. It will give me the look I want and not require panels. The layout from an old Family Handyman article that was pretty good is where my head is at at the moment.