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Our Lumber Program: Thomas Grade!

Please Note That All References Made In This Website To #1 Pine Boards and #2 Pine Boards Are Called 1 COMMON and 2 COMMON Under Lumber Grading Rules.

After months of questioning why Home Depot had below grade lumber in their stores. Steve Conwell the lumber buyer for The Home Depot came to the West Palm Beach store #225 and met with us. He tried to show us that everything was fine with the lumber and that it was all graded properly. But when he took on my wife Barbara Thomas he soon found he was in over his head. He had to admit that the lumber was bad and off grade and proposed the following program. There is more on this in The Off Grade Lumber Practice Section.

The Lumber Program that was set up for us consisted of the following: Home Depot started selling us number 1  grade lumber for the number 2 grade price. Since they did not sell number 1 grade in the stores they gave us our own grade at Idaho Timber called The Thomas Grade Lumber. This was only sold to us and it was even given a sku number so we could pay for it through the registers. They hand picked this material for us at Idaho Timbers 5 lumber mills and put our  THOMAS GRADE  labels on each unit and stored as much as we wanted in any store we chose in the overhead racks. They would get it down for us whenever we wished and we only bought the boards we wanted. The rest went out on the floor to be sold to the public. We were told that if they sold the number 1 grade in the stores it would sell for over $20.00 a board and not the $8.00 price we were paying. We were told by Steve Conwell that the reason they had number 1 grade was to mix a small percent  with the number 2 grade at Idaho Timber and then they could sell all of it as number 2 or better.  The Home Depot arranged the Thomas Grade Lumber Program  at their expense. We did not pay anything up front for this Program or for all the lumber they stored for us. We just paid for each piece as we purchased it. On many occasions when our material did not come in when promised we were sold select grade pine ($28.00 per board) for the number 2 price. We also received several hundred dollars of free select pine that we were told was free for all our trouble, when our promised shipments of lumber did not arrive as promised. They had us pick this material up from Furman Lumber. We were getting this material for over two years until Barbara was hurt in one of the Home Depot Stores.