oh for sure. "here is my shop space, some spare room" thats the size of my entire house. And on the table top gaming front, very envious of US households i see with their similarly sized D&D room with a floor space that rivals my entire ground floor.

And the wood supply is always so cheap and plentiful!

“Yeah, here I'm making a simple spice rack out of some purple heart and cocobolo I just had lying around.”

I'm pretty pleased already if I can get my hands on a few scant planks of walnut at a passable price here in the Netherlands.

"I love wandering around my local wood yard and I've just come back with these lovely panels for making a jewellery box, and this great piece of yew I'm going to turn into a longbow."

Every sawmill/timber merchant/whatever near me basically sells fences and roof trusses.

This is largely the case in the US as well. Most lumber yards principally sell building materials (dimensional lumber, plywood, and other "engineered wood products"). Finding lumber other than dimensional SPF for one of a small handful of species already milled (but poorly) usually requires a trip to a specialist vendor.

For example: Home Depot (which is a national chain of home improvement stores) generally stocks pine, red oak, some yellow poplar (which is not actually a poplar, but I digress), and sometimes something they'll call mahogany (which almost certainly isn't Swietenia anything) . That is about as good as you'll find unless you go somewhere that specializes in hardwood lumber. Unfortunately, some of those don't do retail sales.

For US readers in the northeast, Highland Hardwoods and Northland Forest Products both do retail sales. Northland is more focused on North American wood, though they stock FSC certified mahogany. They're about 10 minutes from each other about an hour and 15 minutes from Boston (usual traffic caveats apply), where I suspect a lot of people from HN at this time are located.

I have to search for 'exotic lumber' to find places selling anything more than construction grade stuff. Otherwise, yeah, all dimensional lumber, plywood, mdf, etc.

>And the wood supply is always so cheap and plentiful!

On the other hand, I always see Europeans complaining that American houses are made out of wood and aren't designed to last like good concrete or brick European houses... Well now you know why. No need to double the cost of materials for most houses.

I wanted to make a very basic cabinet for my bathroom. It basically required two long planks, yet the price of these two planks was more than buying a ready made cabinet from ikea.

One thing to keep in mind is that wood is more expensive the larger it is. Learning to assemble large panels from smaller scrap -- either decoratively with rails holding smaller panels or by just gluing everything together into one big flat panel -- can let you trade time for money in your projects.

Smaller pieces will typically cost less at the lumber yard, and it also makes it easier to work with salvaged wood -- you no longer need to find big pieces to salvage, you can salvage a lot of little pieces and build them up.

Also note that salvage isn't just dumpster diving -- at auctions and sales you can find large things people made for particular purposes that no one wants, and break them down for raw materials. I've picked up a couple hundred dollars of dimensional lumber for a $5 bid before because it was in the form of a 9 foot tall viewing platform for refereeing volleyball games.

That should clue you in as to how cheap the panels ikea uses. If you want to be part of the throw away culture buy ikea. If you want it to be usable for the next 300 years spend the money on real wood.

The price of walnut here in the UK right now is insaaaane. I think France can often have it for a decent price but you really have to know a guy who knows a guy who seems to have his own mill.

If anyone is saying cocobolo is cheap here in the US, they must be making a lot more money than I am, and I can afford a Sawstop and Festool workshop. I've got 7-8 shops where I can buy exotic wood locally, and none of them stock it on a regular basis. Online, about the cheapest I can find it for is $50/board foot, which is way outside of my budget for use in any real quantity.

I ended up doing all the skirting boards for my office spread between both the office itself and the room next door, just to have enough space :D

I do actually have that rare privilege of having a "workshop" space (a solid shed), but as I'm in Wales it is of course up some extremely slippery stone steps, currently leaking quite dramatically, and full of crap I've chucked out of the house but can't take to the tip during lockdown measures.