Storing your lumber properly is fairly important. If the wood is not stored and stacked in the correct manner, it may become warped or twisted while it dries. this will make future machining of the wood more difficult and much more wasteful.

It is not uncommon for woodworkers to start to hoard wood. A trip to the lumber yard to pick up wood for a particular project may lead lead some woodworkers to buy more than they went in for. You might be looking through the bins a see a particularly nicely figured or grained wood, and say to yourself, 'that would be nice for a future project, I don't know what yet, but I'll buy it . . ' If you don't have an efficient storage space set aside, soon enough you will have lots of lumber stacked all on top of each other. We all know that it's hard enough to keep the shop clean as it is, so it's best to get a good wood bin or storage rack set up before you start accumulating.

Here is an example of a mounted storage rack. Notice how all the wood is laid as flat as possible.

If your lumber is not quite dry. It is important to 'sticker' it. This means that between each piece of wood, you place a small perpendicular piece of wood, or stick, in order to separate the lumber and allow air flow between all the pieces.

Also, if you are storing your wood outside, which is perectly fine to do as long as it is off the ground and covered up, make sure that you bring the pieces that you will be using into your workshop as far ahead of time as possible. The same goes for when you are buying wood from a lumber yard that has the wood stored outside. Giving your wood two weeks of acclimatisation to the humidity inside your shop, will create less problems while machining. if you do not allow your wood to acclimatize, you will find that after you joint and plane your wood perfectly square and flat, it will tend to warp in not too long a time as themoisture in the wood dries unevenly.