How to Identify Different Types of Wood Furniture

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When I was refinishing an 80 year-old dresser one of the first things I did as I started to remove the paint was try to identify what type of wood it was made out of. I really only had a couple options based on the piece’s time period and style, but I didn’t really know very much about types of wood at the time.

Some people can just naturally look at a piece of wood and immediately identify what it is. It’s almost an inborn ability with them. I had worked with mostly different types of pine and oak in the past, but this was a piece of furniture and it was all new to me at the time. It took me a lot of searching online before I found a good guide for different wood types that are often used with furniture.

I found a few good wood identification guides with my research.

The best site I’ve found for quickly identifying wood types is unexpectedly found at site dedicated to antique clocks made out of wood. They have two different pages for picking out your wood type based on description and appearance. They have common wood types and exotic wood types. They don’t have every kind of wood (that would probably be next to impossible to categorize), but they have everything you’ll ever need to identify the wood types of older pieces of furniture. They don’t, for example, have any graphic representation of parawood, but that’s because parawood has only been used for furniture in the United States relatively recently.

I also found another great wood types guide for identifying more modern wood types in today’s furniture over at Millstores.com. This lists the twelve most common types of wood used in the bulk of furniture made today.

Most wood is broken into two categories: hard wood and soft wood.

Soft Wood vs Hard Woods

The softer wood, like pine, tends to be cheaper to buy because it grows so much faster than the harder woods like maple. Soft wood can usually be easily scratched and dented, even with your fingernail.  In fact, that’s one quick way to test to see how “hard” a single piece of wood is: try to push on it with your fingernail in a spot that won’t be seen or used.  If you can leave a little dent then it’s probably a softer wood.

Another good indicator?  Weight.  Soft wood tends to be a little less dense, and therefore a little lighter to carry and move around, than heavier and harder woods.

Just because a wood is soft doesn’t mean it isn’t good or that it’s cheap and flimsy.   Different applications (furniture, framing, decor, wainscoting or beadboard) require different types of wood. Sometimes different types of wood are chosen for an application simply for its grain and looks. You’ll come across a number of different types of wood during almost any home improvement project you’re engaged from refinishing furniture to framing a room to remodeling a kitchen.

Using both of these guides I have actually been going around my house and identifying what other pieces of furniture are made out of. It’s fun and fairly easy once you get the hang of it!

Tags: furniture

This entry was posted on October 17, 2006 at 3:13 am and is filed under Woodworking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.