On Friday I went to gather up my "old board" collection to be used in furring out my roof.

In case anyone is confused, by "furring out," I mean applying strips of wood, to which I will attach metal roofing, over top of my existing frame work of rafters.

The roof in question is the top story of my story-and-a-half storage building that I am constructing on my land in Virginia.

Of course, I only get to spend about one day a week working on it, so progress is not exactly speedy.

I live over here in Sparta, so I don't get to go over there very often. I decided to put up this building to help consolidate all my old junk collections, which are located in buildings and homes all over the place. I needed a place to store and display my "goodies," which include old soda bottles and mason jars, old signs and junk and some stuff that I just don't even remember until I get it all sorted out.

As for my old board collection, I discovered that I still had a couple truckloads of random width and size boards that came from a number of locations, most of them free or nearly free. I had gathered about 50 second-hand two-by-fours and about 100 or more old one-by boards of different thicknesses and widths.

The one-by boards will make a real good floor for me, while the two-by-fours were mostly used up in the walls of my building.

The only set back is having to sort through them for thickness, pull out old nails and look for signs of bug problems or rotten spots.

This moves the board application process from the realm of the money intensive — buying new boards at a hardware store — to the realm of the labor intensive — pulling nails and cutting off bad places.

With very little time to spare, I sometimes feel like just forgetting about it. That is, until I go to the hardware store and realize that boards are selling for ridiculous prices these days. Some are selling for double-digits, just for one board! Who could afford that?

Not only that, but I have some that I have salvaged that are 18 or 20 inches wide on average, with some even wider. The stuff they sell today doesn't get over 12 inches or so and you are lucky to find one that wide that isn't in terrible shape.

I suppose all of the old growth trees in this country have been hewn into the beams and telephone poles of the past, leaving spindly and sickly lumber for the boards of the future.

It's kind of sad, isn't it? I saw a program on the Discovery Channel a few months ago at a friend's house that showed a fellow diving in a river to pull out old heart-pine logs that had been lost years ago. The logs had sunk during "flotillas" and were being pulled up and fixed for flooring.

That should tell us all something about our lack of conservation in this country. When it comes down to pulling old logs out of the river because they are so much better than what we have left, it isn't saying much for us as a nation. Not to mention what it says about our current lumber situation.

I used to spend quite a bit of time tearing down old buildings and houses just to get the wood out of them, provided there was enough quality scrap there to make it worthwhile. I have found that the flooring and boards that I find from years gone by are 10 times better than anything I can buy for any amount of money today.

With what I've already gathered up, I have built two decks and about half of my new building.

It takes a little more time to build with scraps, sometimes even altering the design to best use the materials. However, there is a certain satisfaction involved in knowing that you built something (with superior but harder to utilize materials) for little or nothing that would cost someone else several thousand dollars. I guess I have always been somewhat frugal, a term intermittently interchanged with "cheap" or "tight" by some.

It doesn't really bother me in the least. I never have let myself get overly concerned with what other folks think. I can't store my stuff in another man's opinion.

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