I was pretending to be a construction dude this weekend. The joys of home ownership are that: when the mood strikes, there is always something to be done.

The mood struck, and I got out the tools and did some work on my stairwell. Good work? That’s debatable. No judgements until the project is complete, please.

Thing is this: I was at Home Depot and I discovered the joys of culled lumber. Not that culled lumber is generally a good place to start one’s search for building materials, but I knew that two concepts existed in this project: (1) The lengths of boards I required were generally only 3 to 4 feet in length to start with (think narrow stairwell ceiling), and (2) my car only holds so much lumber, and very little 8 foot lumber at that. Culled lumber becomes the ideal solution, being simply the 4 foot “good” ends of otherwise “bad” 8 foot lumber sold for the value price of 51 cents a piece. Generally that means then that I get two 4 foot 2x4s (which I would have cut to that length anyhow) for just a couple pennies more than a dollar, where I’d need to pay nearly 3 bucks for a full length, uncut piece. In other words, average quality, pre-cut lumber = 66% off = woohoo! I bought 8 dollars worth of culled lumber — that would have been regular 24 bucks, ha ha! — and framed the ceiling above the basement stairs, both dropping the level down to about roughly 7 feet (over the previous 7.5 feet) thusly creating a more esthetically pleasing shape to the stairwell in the process — and also making one heck of a lot easier to drywall (which I did subsequently.

If you want a more detailed explanation of all that, you need only ask (preferably while your standing in my stairwell for the whole visualization aspect of it.)