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Showerthought: a 2x4 is actually 1.5x3.5 inches and I wasted $80 on lumber before I learned that
So I am finally building some simple garage shelves, nothing fancy, just three tiers for paint cans and random junk. I grab a cart at the lumber yard and load up a bunch of what the tag calls 2x4s, thinking I will cut them to 24 inches for the uprights. Get them home, measure twice, and they are all one and a half by three and a half. I sat there in my driveway kind of mad because I had already planned everything around two inch thickness and my cuts were off by half an inch on every single piece. Ended up with $80 of wood that mostly went into the scrap pile, which stung since this was supposed to be a cheap first project. I get that they plane it down at the mill, but nobody puts that on the tag at the store. So now I want to know, do you all just plan around the real size from the start, or am I the only one who got burned by the label?
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michael_williams18d ago
Idk if the store is really to blame here, because the 2x4 label is actually the rough size before it gets dried and planed down, so it was never really 2 inches to begin with. My dad showed me this years ago with a tape measure in the aisle and I felt dumb, but it's just how softwood lumber works everywhere. The tricky part for your build is that those uprights will still hold paint cans fine even at 1.5 inches, since you're mostly fighting gravity, not side load. What probably messed up your cuts is planning the spacing around the 2 inch number, not the wood itself being "wrong." Next time grab one board, measure it, then do all your math off 1.5 and 3.5.
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