DerbyDad03 wrote in
If I was a conspiracy theorist, I might think they hope that people will settle for
the crap since they have already paid.
When you get the Menard's yard ticket, are you trapped in your vehicle while everyone in
front of you sorts through whichever pile of crap they are picking from?
There are several lumber yards around here, in addition to HD and Lowes.
Whenever I can, I try to go with the locally owned yards, because they
generally have higher quality, even if they have higher prices. It's
not worth the time and effort to deal with low quality, so you don't
really save money in the end.
Anyway, I recently purchased four 20' LVL beams for the porch addition
I'm building on the back of my house.
One of our local yards had the 2nd best price AND had them in stock, so
I jumped on it. They only charged 30 bucks for delivery, too.
The truck showed up with the four LVLs and two 16' 2x10s, all banded
together.
I walked around the stack and everything looked fine. The truck dumped
the load and left.
Later in the day, I cut the bands and pulled the stack apart to discover
a bunch of long and wide delaminations in the LVLs, and a diagonal
split, over 2' long, up the end of one of the 2x10s. All these defects
were on the inside/center of the stack. That is not a coincidence. I'm
guessing the LVLs has sat outside in the rain for months and had been
bouncing around construction sites, being returned over and over again
and they were just hoping I'd be the sucker who finally kept them.
I will never buy another product from that yard.
There's a commercial supplier in town whom I called. They told be they
were commercial, only, but then asked what I was building and what I
needed. He ended up assigning me a salesman. I told him about the last
LVLs I got and asked him about the quality of theirs. He said, "Man, we
go through so many of these every day that they don't have time to sit
around getting wet."
They LVLs I got from them were the cheapest price with no delivery
charge, and in great shape.
--
-MIKE-
"Playing is not something I do at night, it's my function in life"
--Elvin Jones (1927-2004)
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