A valid question: lumber or timber? Which phrase talks about the product from forest trees that you are making reference to? Well, either you and many more may say. "It's pure semantics - only academic debate, as they both refer to products obtained from woods grown in forests". "Oh no" would say the purist and in particular the master craftsman working from a small manufacturing facility or farm barn making exquisite furniture. "I most definitely don't use lumber. I only use the finest timber when crafting pieces of furniture."
These terms are generally interchanged by many people to refer to the product that is generically named wood. Wood to you and I, is wood - the material we saw and glue and nail or screw together to make Suzie's Wendi house from. Well the chances are that you built Suzie's pride and joy from lumber and not timber. So, then what is the difference?
It would appear that the term lumber means the wood obtained and cut from trees and prepared for use primarily in the construction industry, the mining industry, the agricultural market and in the making of paper and cardboard. It, nonetheless, is also chipped and employed in the manufacturing of chip board. (A timber, is it not?) Timber conversely, is sawed into boards and planks and various structural components to be used mainly in the manufacturing of furniture and allied products. So, maybe the major difference is that timber is used to craft things from, whilst lumber is used to construct things from.
Lumber is employed broadly in the construction industry, from civil engineering jobs, to the development of commercial buildings and in the building of homes. Barriers and temporary ramps are easily and inexpensively built and taken down to be relocated as and when required on site. Boxing and cladding methods are often employed using lumber planking, while scaffold planking, today, is as popular as decades ago. While sizeable building roofs are mostly manufactured from steel, the roofing of homes are still mainly constructed using wooden trusses.
Agriculture is a large user of wood, not just as fuel, but also in fencing. The wine industry use a lot of poles in their wineries, while tomato harvesting cannot produce without light pole struts to keep the tomato plants upright and off the ground. An enormous amount of lumber is further more used in the agricultural sector for the manufacturing of packaging boxes and crates in addition to the large volumes of pallets manufactured for the agricultural sector but also other industries. Creosoted poles are utilized in large volumes in several uses from the construction of paddocks for race horses to general fencing poles to even the construction of store shacks together with split poles.
The paper and allied businesses are very large users of lumber in the manufacturing of paper and card board, where lumber is chipped and further refined into wood pulp prior to being turned into paper.
So, while the craftsmen consider timber to be finer quality than lumber, don't decry lumber its place in the grand general scheme of things. Without lumber there could hardly be a construction industry, the agricultural field would sorely miss it and our little ones would have to resort to using slates and chalk rather pen and paper at school. Also, where would Suzie serve tea to Rosie and co?