Its sapwood (the outer rings of the tree trunk where the wood is the youngest and still growing) can be a pale yellow, making a stark contrast between the lighter outer rings and the darker inner rings. Choose the wood that fits your decorating needs and enhances existing furnishings. Cherry Wood Furniture: Where Does It Come From? Well, it's no wonder! The color of an object like wood is determined by its chemical makeup and its quantum mechanical interaction with light (photons). It's made by taking a cheaper wood, bleaching it, texturizing it with chemicals, then staining it with a "cherry" stain. Here’s what to look for when identifying pine, oak, maple, walnut, cherry, birch, cedar, poplar, ash, and Douglas fir. However, there are a few key criteria to look for in wood identification. It's unlikely you'll ever find black flecks or streaks in faux cherry woods. At first, linseed and tung oil finishes give cherry a deeper, richer appearance than film-forming finishes like shellac, lacquer and polyurethane. Mom with 2 awesome teenagers and hubby. The most common types of ash trees can be separated into two basic categories: white ash and black ash. Most furniture that's sold as cherry isn't cherry at all. Oak is another common type of wood in North America. Surprisingly, Douglas fir isn’t a true fir (it was named after a Scottish botanist in the 1790s who described it as one), but has its own genus. Because of these variations in the grain—the visible growth rings and the knots—it lends itself to a more rustic, casual look. 8 Beautiful Home Projects Using Reclaimed Wood, 6 Quick Tips for Maintaining Wood Countertops. It sands to a very smooth finish relatively easily and … Hard to believe isn't it? This only compounds the challenges involved with identifying wood types. If you're trying to identify poplar, it has a heartwood with a creamy, light yellow-brown color, sometimes with streaks of gray, green, or even a gray-purple hue. Finally, Douglas fir is a very common softwood—a term that's not reflective of its density or durability, but rather of its status as a conifer. Most woods are brown because they do not absorb photons that appear brown. A single cherry wood board can have several contrasting grain patterns depending … Brian and Joni Buzarde’s self-designed home sits on a customized chassis by PJ Trailers that’s just eight and a half feet wide. In fact, because of its low cost, poplar is often stained to mimic pricier hardwoods, making it particularly difficult to identify this type of wood in certain situations. Here is a video of someone splitting cherry. In this application, the flooring and stair risers have been treated with a varnish tinted one percent white. Are there occasional black flecks and black streaks in the wood? Cherry has a simple, fine, closed grain, much like that of maple. The island and cabinets in this kitchen are fashioned from re-milled Douglas fir beams salvaged from upstate New York; the knots and wavy grain are what makes this wood type identifiable. It's known for being extremely stiff and strong for its weight, and therefore it's a valuable type of commercial lumber. Secondly, take into account whether the piece of wood you're looking at is stained or weathered, since these processes alter the visual appearance of the wood and can make it tricky to see its true color, grain direction, and composition. There are few knots in red and white oak, but a distinctive feature that makes it easy to identify the species is visible in a certain cut of the wood, called quartersawn, where it displays strong flecks of rays (cells that run perpendicular to growth rings). You can do this by looking at the edges of a piece and seeing if the end grain matches up with the direction of the grain along the face of the wood. I don’t think all kinds of cherry are like that though. Poplar grows throughout the northern hemisphere and is relatively inexpensive because of its prevalence. In addition, because the wood will continue to naturally darken in color as it ages, if the initial treatment is too dark, it may eventually be unrecognizable as cherry, which would defeat our purpose here. Cherry can often be identified because of its reddish-brown tone, which starts out as a lighter, pinkish-yellow hue that darkens after being exposed to sunlight. White ash grows from the East Coast through the Midwest of the United States and has a lighter heartwood color and wider-spaced growth rings than black ash, which has a slightly darker hardwood. It has a straight grain with some distinction between growth rings and the rest of the wood, and is often used for cabinetry since it's not strongly affected by changes in humidity. That's right, don't be deceived by the design and price of the furniture, get to know the wood. Of the more than 600 species of oak that exist in the world, the most readily available are red oak and white oak. Freshly harvested cherry wood is a light pinkesh color but as cherry ages or ripens in the presence of light, it gets darker and eventually reaches a rich reddish brown. In terms of appearance, Douglas fir usually has a light-brown color with a touch of red or yellow in-between darker growth rings, although the appearance can range widely depending on age and location of growth. Light cherry furniture tends to look warmer, yet less formal than dark cherry. In fact, there are over a dozen different species of cedar that belong to several different families of trees, some of which closely resemble cypress or juniper trees. For the record, I was using a splitting axe. Cherry is gorgeous wood, but as you’ve probably discovered, it can be nasty to finish. The wood is used to make furniture, flooring and cabinets. In the right amount, water is toxic. As with any natural product, we expect and embrace unique characteristics in the wood grain. So when you're shopping be sure to ask if the furniture is brand new or if it's been in the showroom for a number of months. This will help give you an idea what its like. Its sapwood can have wide spacing between growth rings, which tends to be beige or light brown, and can blend in with the heartwood. Ray Eames drew on her training as a sculptor to design a new kind of occasional piece for the lobby of the Time-Life Building in New York City. Cherry wood is moderately heavy, hard, and strong, and it also machines and sands to glass-like smoothness. Species of birch are found in northern temperate climates like North America, Europe, and Asia, and will typically have a less dense and looser grain than maple. The most common type of cherry wood found in North America is black cherry.