Make All Your Home Projects Look Great with Beautiful Appearance Boards

Appearance boards are a popular choice for building furniture, cabinetry, shelves, crafting and other indoor applications. This lumber grade generally comes from the higher end of standard graded common boards. The emphasis is on how the boards look because the projects they’re used in will often be left unpainted. For this reason, grading is done by visual inspection and suitability to end use rather than strength. Appearance boards are available as softwood boards, hardwood boards, and laminated boards.

There are three recognized grades of appearance lumber. "Finish" is the highest and is almost blemish-free. To avoid defacing the wood, the grade stamp is usually on back or ends of the lumber. The next grade is “Select”, with four sub-grades of A, B, C and D. Boards at the high end of this scale may show a few small defects but they will not have any splits or knots. The final designation is “Common”. These appearance boards may have an overall knotty appearance (though this is preferred for some types of projects).