One working day, eight stops, told in order.

07:00

The inbound gate

Trailers back onto the hard standing and get unloaded onto the ground, not counted off a manifest. The driver stays. Anything unexpected — a wet stack, a mixed load, a count discrepancy — gets photographed and resolved before anyone signs. Fifteen minutes here removes an entire category of dispute later.

What we look for: moisture, mold, banding and film mixed in, chemical staining, and whether the load matches what was described.

07:40

The size lanes

48×40 GMA splits off first — deepest market, fastest turn. Then the secondary footprints: 42×42, 48×48, 40×48, 48×42. Then genuinely odd sizes, which are routed straight to dismantling because there is no reliable resale market for a lone 53×37.

Sorting before grading matters: a Grade A odd-size is worth less than a Grade B GMA, and handling them identically wastes labour on the wrong item.

08:15

The grading line

This is where the economics of the whole yard are decided. Graders work under natural light because artificial light flattens the shadow that reveals a hairline stringer crack and washes out the grey-green of early mold. Each pallet is turned, sighted along the stringers, checked at the notches, and checked by hand for protruding fasteners.

Output: Grade A, Grade B, repairable, or dismantle. A good grader handles several hundred pallets an hour and is the most valuable person here.

09:30

The repair bay

Roughly four in five inbound cores come through here. Broken deck boards are replaced with full-length lumber — never offcuts, because a short board transfers load unevenly into the stringers and creates the next failure. Cracked stringers get a companion, glued and nailed along the full length.

Protruding nails are pulled, not hammered flush. A hammered nail migrates back out under vibration and shreds a stretch wrap somewhere in Indiana.

11:00

The band saw

What cannot be repaired is dismantled. A good dismantler recovers considerably more usable lumber than a poor one, and that difference lands directly in yard margin. Deck boards and cut stringers are sorted by species, length and condition.

Recovered lumber feeds three places: the repair bay, reclaimed-content custom builds, and direct sale as reclaimed lumber.

13:00

The treatment chamber

Export stock is stacked for airflow, probed at the coldest predicted point in the charge, and held above 56°C core for a minimum of thirty minutes with margin. Charge records — date, quantity, temperature trace, hold duration — are retained.

Stamping happens after treatment, never before. A pre-stamped pallet that fails a charge is a compliance failure waiting to be discovered at a port.

14:30

The stacking bay

Finished stock is banded in fifteens and dated. Dating matters more than people expect: it lets us rotate inventory properly and it lets a customer trace a load back to a specific week if something is wrong with it.

Loads are planned for weight and cube together. A trailer of oak Grade A can weigh out before it cubes out, and finding that at a scale house is expensive.

15:45

The grinder

The last stop, and deliberately the smallest. Ground material is screened, then coloured for landscape mulch or sold as biomass boiler fuel. Nails pass under magnets on the outfeed and are recovered as scrap steel.

A yard that grinds a large share of its intake is a yard that is not sorting and repairing well. Ours takes about six percent of inbound mass.