Wood choice

Almost all of my furniture projects are made with dried lumber.

My lumber is sourced from two places:

• Auctions - I attend personal property auctions in the nearby rural areas to buy tools for my tool business, sometimes these include rough lumber as well. If it's a good deal, I buy some and stash it in my shed. It's is usually a pretty good deal. Usually, they are from trees on the property or nearby so it's mostly red/white oak, walnut, and cherry. Cut at a local mill or mobile mill and air-dried. Quality runs the gamut, but it's cheap.
• Local lumber yard - If I need something specific that's not in the lumber shed already, it's off to the lumber yard. Almost always this will be kiln-dried commercially harvested wood. So the quality is high, as is the price. Almost anything that's still commercially harvested is available.

In the period, furniture could be made with either dried wood or green wood depending on a number of variables. Generally speaking, the later in the period and/or the higher status the item, the more likely it would be made with dried wood. Vernacular furniture is probably mostly green, but since very little of it survives, we'll never know.

I don't use green wood because it's hard to get in suburbia and my shop time is highly variable.

It's not uncommon for months to go by between projects so unless some wood becomes available at just the right time, it will dry out too much before I can work it. For wood like oak, that's the worst of both worlds. The surface is hard and stringy, but it's not fully dry and will move substantially as it fully dries.

I am much more interested in a quality reproduction than a fully period production process, so dried wood.