Get FREE OAK For Your Next Woodworking Project! TIPS AND TRICKS

Hey guys, welcome back to Barovian Made. Now, today we're going to be taking a nice little chill one and I'm going to be teaching you how I get my free lumber, my free wood, my free hardwood of all things. Now, ever since I started woodworking, I haven't had a lot of money, tools cost a lot of money, so free is the best thing. Plus, when you're a beginner, you scrap a load of projects. So free wood, best wood. So let me go through about how I get my lumber. All this wood you see behind me, I got for either completely free or dirt cheap. I think I've spent about 40 quid on this pile of oak. This is a mixture between red oak and white oak. I have mostly white oak here, which I prefer white oak. You recently saw me use red oak at some of these big boards at the back on a recent bar project. But let's start talking about how you can get your hands on all this stuff. So as you can see, it's all oak. It's all nice, solid oak. And as you might be able to even tell just from these photos, a lot of it is from old furniture. Now, every night before I go to bed, I have a little look on Facebook marketplace. I have a little look around to see what people are getting rid of because the majority of the time these bits of furniture are really old furniture that's handed down. And then people don't really know the value of the furniture and they end up either giving it away or selling it for 20, 30 quid at a time. So yeah, that's how I get the majority of my free stuff. But there is some big downsides. And I'm going to tell you what to look out for, what you need to be careful about and the type of stuff you need to go for. So we've got a marketplace and we're just looking up old Chester drawers and stuff like that, having a little look around. This is our first one. Usually like this looks quite old. Usually the old stuff seems to be more solid, but just zooming in and having a look. The wood looks pretty thin. And what we've got to take into consideration is that we have to plane this stuff. We have to sand this stuff and do all this stuff. So do we have enough material left over to make a solid bit of furniture? And this one, I'm not a hundred percent sure on. So I'll leave that one. And this one is just obviously not oak. You can see it from a mile off in the charging way too much for what it is. So you have to be careful about people lying on marketplace and stuff as well, because you can see from these photos, this definitely is not oak whatsoever. So be careful out there, you know, us woodworkers and people, we know this is pine and it's not oak. But yeah, and another misidentification. This person is saying that it is pine, but if we look closely, we can see that it is indeed oak and it's at a very good price. And so far everything looks solid. If we look at all the grain, we can see there's no repeating patterns. So it's less likely to be a veneer because a veneer is all part of like, you know, the same piece of wood, but cut into thin slices. So we're going to go ahead. We're going to message this person. I'm going to go pick it up. Right. So we've secured the unit for marketplace. Good news. It is all real nice, solid oak. So we managed to get a good hit here, 20 quid for a solid oak top. All this is nice, solid oak. This it's all solid oak. The only parts that are veneered are these shelves here. And the way you can check to see if they're veneered is just get a little knife, scratch it and see if underneath it's either chipboard, MDF or another type of wood. But luckily, these are the parts, the only things that are veneered. And you can sort of tell with the feeling, like it's kind of hard to, it's kind of hard to say it over camera, but just by the feel and look of these, you can sort of realize the veneered. The things you want to look out for when doing veneer is you want to check the end grain of things. If you can see end grain, it's solid. You don't get end grain veneer. I might be wrong. You might be able to get end grain veneer, but end grain, it's too, it's not strong enough to be a veneer. You know, if you're cutting a few millimeters out of end grain, you know, it's just going to snap and break because the end grain isn't that strong. So when you see end grain, good sign. When you look on the photos, look for end grain. Other things to look out for as well. I've noticed this a lot with Stoller's furniture. Someone puts a, you know, saying, Oh, it's from Stoller's and stuff. If you can see the table, it has a border that goes around it. And then one big lump in the middle, nine times out of 10, that thing in the middle that is veneered and the stuff on the outside is the end grain. Hold on one minute. All right. This is a piece that I picked up from a Stoller's, a bit of furniture that someone was giving away. I managed to get this table for free, so I wasn't too bothered, but you can see here, we can see end grain, all this here, solid wood, but this table had a part, one of these here, one of those there, one there and one there. And the whole inside of it was just veneered wood. So look out for that. There's still plenty of good wood on like a Stoller's bit of furniture, like these parts. This is a nice big chunky piece, but watch your price on it. You know, you don't want to spend hundreds of pounds just to find out the majority of the wood is veneered. So watch yourself when it comes to that stuff. That's the biggest thing you need to worry about when it comes to veneer and stuff. And another good thing to look out on photos as well, is to see if there's any chips and stuff like that. Oh yeah, here, you can't really see very well. I'll zoom in on it while I'm talking over this, but there was a little chip here. I saw that on the photo and it's, well, obviously if a veneer chips, you just see the MDF underneath, but with this chips, you can still see the grain underneath. So that's what you need to look out for as well. So let's quit talking. Let's get this unit stripped down. And if I come up with any more tips, I'll tell you. Oh, and another thing I forgot to mention, have a look underneath here. You can see where the bits are actually glued together and they didn't bother to clean and smooth the underside. So that's another good telltale sign that the inside or whatever you're So the way I like to tackle taking these bits of furniture apart is taking off anything that is easy to take off, like the drawers, the doors, bits of hardware and things I can see. And usually I'll flip it over, attack it from the bottom and work my way up. Usually the things, everything's on the bottom because, you know, manufacturers are trying to hide all the screws and all that stuff, you know, to make things look a bit nicer as you would. So I go around, I take around every bit of screws I can see. And as you can see here, sometimes screws just spin and they don't actually come out. Jam a screwdriver in there, catch it on threads and they'll work their way out. But get yourself a drill, put yourself a Phillips screwdriver on or whatever screwdriver you need and just go ahead and attack it all. It is also a good idea to keep a very small screwdriver on hand because there is some tricky corners to get into and stuff as well. You know, the majority of these places that you're buying furniture from aren't wanting you to take it apart. So as they're gluing and screwing everything in the process, they're not quite, you know, making things accessible. But a good way to get rid of these little back panel things is a little block. Just hammer them out. I did try to keep them all in one piece at first because these are all bits of solid oak as but I got a little happy with the hammer and just went smashing up. And here you can see all the parts that are veneered and which are not. I thought the sides were solid oak but it turns out just the trim around the outsides was solid oak and the actual main panels were just veneered which is a little disappointing but, you know, I got this table for £20, I can't argue. So now I'm going to go around, do a little bit of hammer work, take out any other screws that we see. Now that we've opened it up a bit more, I can get a head in there. And this is what I was on about before when I was saying there can be some awkward places. I had to get my head right under there and wiggle around a bit to get things going. But you'll notice as soon as you take the majority of the stuff off, everything becomes a lot more easier. I just had one main supporting bit left and I didn't realise there was a screw in there so I screwed it out and it all came out pretty easily. And then from there I can just pull everything apart and those little blocks come off really easily with a hammer and chisel. Just gotta go around, chisel them off. And I noticed as I was doing this there was a bit of masking tape with some measurements and stuff on it on the inside of a glue joint. So I'm not sure if this was made by a manufacturer or if it was handmade. I don't really know of people, you know, putting veneer on chipboard unless it's a manufacturer but this could be handmade and if it is handmade it kind of feels a bit sacrilegious taking it apart but you know this table wasn't wanted, it was selling cheap, it was on marketplace for a while and no one was taking it so if I didn't take it it would have ended up in the tip someday. Right so we've got everything stripped down and as you can see we have a line. On this side of the line we have the veneer, no one likes the veneer. And this side of the line we have all the solid oak. Now I know what you're thinking, yes we've got some good chunks here, they're going to come in handy for a lot of good builds and then you're looking at this stuff down here you're like what the hell are you going to do with all these little bits here? Well don't sleep on them because what a lot of manufacturers do, and I've found this out through taking apart so many of these tables and stuff, actually wait I think I have a piece. Come on where you at? Oh no, oh f**k, oh f**k, oh f**k. Please don't fall on me, you're very heavy. That was a lot of hassle but I got what I was looking for. As you can see here it's loads of off cuts all glued up together. That was on a piece of furniture that someone bought and was very happy with. So all these little bits, all these little chunks and stuff, when it comes to it you can plane them all down to the same size, glue them up in a big slab and you have a nice big chunk of wood to work with. And with all these holes that are left by the screws and stuff, I've showed you plug cutters and stuff in the past, you can use one of them and get it all nice. So don't throw away or sleep on any of this small stuff, you know even this stuff, it's still good, it's still all good oak, even for like chopping boards or end grain stuff, it's good, don't throw it away. You also don't have to throw away this veneered stuff because this is still oak, it's just veneered onto some chipboard. You can make very cheap little jewellery boxes and stuff out of this, as long as you do mitre cuts and stuff like that, you'll be able to get away with it. Personally, I throw this stuff out, you know, I don't want to deal with veneer and all that stuff, I'm happy just getting bits of furniture for free and stuff like that, stripping them down and taking the good bits, taking the tip. So that's everything overall, I think a very good haul. I am very, very, very happy with this big table here because what we could technically do is just quickly sand it, put some stain on it, buy some cheap legs from Amazon and flog it back on and we'd get like 10 times what we spent on the whole batch and we'd still have all these nice big chunks of oak. So I've been very excited to show and share this with you because I got this information and how to look all the stuff from a guy that I went to go pick a tool up from Facebook marketplace. I saw he had loads of oak laying around, big fireplaces and stuff, like I've got some stuff from a fireplace, that's all been brilliant oak. If you watch some of my shorts, I've been using that wood to do my mother's house, which is annoying because I quite like that wood, I wanted to keep it but can't argue with the mother. But he told me everything I needed to know about going to small, like looking on marketplace, opening up your radius to small towns because if you live in a big city, there's hundreds of eyes looking on it, people can get more for what they want. But like this unit here, I got it for £20, the majority of it is solid oak, I got it from a small town called Bootle, not a lot of people there, not a lot of eyes looking on it, people sell things for cheaper or even just give it away because they can't sell it. So look at these small towns, it's worth the little drive and it's a nice trip out. So that's everything really, also got a nice little box of hardware, I'm always open to nice screws and we all know these are all furniture grade screws, got little bits of hardware like hinges and stuff like that, you've seen me use the hinges from one of these tables on the circular, no what's it called, surface planer, on the surface planer stand that we made, I used the hardware from a TV stand, on that I got, I got all that completely free. All these little bits come in handy, so you just have to be savvy with it. Before you go to bed, look on marketplace and after a while, marketplace knows what you look for and they show you these things, they bring them to you. I go on marketplace now, all I see is, you know, just oak furniture, oak cabinets and stuff that are going for cheap, so marketplace doesn't mean you're solid with that. But yeah, there is a lot of things to look out for, like I said earlier, with that unit someone's trying to flog off for £200 saying that's oak, when it's obviously pine and it's not worth £200 and there's nowhere near £200 worth of lumber there. You know, there's certain things to look out for, but as long as you follow these tips, everything that I've told you, you should be good. So, get yourself a Facebook marketplace, get yourself some cheap lumber, make some beautiful furniture and some nice products out of it and see you in the next one.