Local operation gives home-center lumber a makeover center

So, this is the weekend you decide to put up those bookshelves you've been promising your family since Memorial Day.

As you wander through the aisles of your local home center store, be assured that people such as Todd Featherly are doing their darnedest to offer you a good selection of the best-looking boards possible.

Featherly, general manager of the Idaho Timber Corporation's Whitefish facility, runs that company's Montana lumber remanufacturing operation.

"Our plant caters to the home center industry," Featherly said. "Lowe's and Home Depot are our customers.

"We basically clean up lumber and make it appealing to the consumer."

The Whitefish facility sorts, trims, cuts - and sometimes rejects - No. 2 grade boards of one-inch thickness. The board most often seen there is common pine, but might also be the slightly more exotic inland red cedar or select Radiata pine.

Featherly receives his raw material from Montana mills such as Plum Creek Timber Co. and Pyramid Lumber, but also gets lumber from mills throughout the northwestern United States and Canada. The Radiata pine is shipped from New Zealand.

"We cut to home-center lengths," Featherly said. "That means the 4- to 12-foot lengths that consumers are looking for."

The home center stores expect their inventories to look spiffy because once a load of boards gets picked over - and all the good stuff is gone - what remains is often not salable.

Idaho Timber's job is to make sure that all the boards that come through the front door of the store will sell.

Much can go wrong with a length of board, so there is an industry standard for grading wood. Western Wood Products Association, for example, sets limits for how much twist, bow and wane and how many knots and holes will be tolerated in the finished product.

"But those rules aren't stringent enough for the home centers," Featherly said. "They want a better grade than the standardized one."

When boards arrive at the Whitefish plant, they first must be graded, marked and sorted. This is labor-intense work that doesn't get much of a technical assist. It requires skilled and savvy workers to quickly spot both the good and bad features of each piece coming down the line.

Once the product is sorted, it must be trimmed, cut to length, bar-coded and wrapped before it is ready to ship out. Residual products of the process are sold for particle board and pressboard.

The 10-acre, 65,000-square-foot Whitefish plant processes 25 million board-feet a year. Currently it has nearly 35 employees and is looking for half a dozen more. Featherly runs two shifts a day and said that business is not seasonally impacted.

Idaho Timber Corporation was started in 1979 by Larry Williams - the Whitefish operation was the first plant he purchased. In April this year, Idaho Timber was sold to Leucadia National, a publicly traded company described by Forbes magazine as a "diversified holding company engaged in a variety of businesses, including telecommunications, health-care services, banking and lending, manufacturing, real estate activities, winery operations, and property and casualty reinsurance."

The name "Idaho Timber Corporation of Montana" has been retained.

These days the cost of shipping is a major problem in the business.

Idaho Timber ships its finished boards to Home Depot and Lowe's distribution centers in Ohio and Florida - among other national locations. Shipments are made by truck and rail and, according to Featherly, "rail is better these days" when it comes to price.

"We're responsible for maintaining an inventory in the distribution centers - usually a three- to five-week inventory," Featherly said.

"We haven't raised our prices, even though fuel has gone up. We're very conservative and buy our raw material as efficiently as we can and keep our manufacturing costs as low as possible."

Sale prices are tied to those set in Random Lengths, a weekly industry publication. Home centers pay on a four-week average of prices.

Business has been steady lately, Featherly said, and the plant has been kept busy. Prices have been good.

"If we do our job right, we're not vulnerable to fluctuations in the market," he said.

When it comes to plant safety, Idaho Timber has unquestionably been doing its job right. The plant has gone more than five years without a single, lost-time accident.

Reporter George Kingson may be reached at 758-4438 or by e-mail at gkingson@dailyinterlake.com