Anderson & McQuaid

My fiancé and I went here to buy crown molding. We had a vague idea of what we were looking for but had never bought lumber like this before. We were so fortunate that Bob was so incredibly helpful — he showed us where to see the molding they offered, then brought us to the section where we could pick out what we needed, cut the pieces for us and checked us out quickly. Great customer service and very fair prices! Highly recommend especially for home improvement newbies!

I was amazed at the size of the inventory, the quality of the products, and the friendliness and expertise of the staff at Anderson & McQuaid. There is NO comparison between this place and Home Depot. We found the most amazing, thick, gorgeous beadboard for our kitchen renovation here — so much better than the overpriced, plywood junk sold at Home Depot! Their motto, «where details matter» says it all.
Anderson and McQuaid: YOU ROCK!

Review for woodworkers: Overall a positive experience. I’m sure I’ll return for small projects, but a few issues: As has been stated, you have to buy the full board. Depending on the scale of your work that can really blow your materials budget. Also the shorts aren’t discounted from what I can tell. I paid more for 2 oak shorts than a full clear cherry board. They also only sell dimensional lumber. I prefer to buy in the rough for several reasons — price being one of them. The selection is probably great for the area, but you’ll find more wood and more space to look it over outside the city.
I’ll probably continue to visit occasionally, but for anything but a small project I’ll likely head up to Highland in NH.

I have been building cherry wood furniture and clocks for several years; and will only purchase from Anderson & McQuaid. Yes, there is a bit of effort involved in selection, but you get to do it your self.
My only issue is the price. They are not the cheapest, but they are the best. For my needs, it’s worth the extra time and money to go there.

Short review: Definitely go there for moulding. Decent place for dimensional hardwood. Good prices. They publish the info you need online. I don’t think their hardwood lumber is ethically billed, though. They also won’t sell partial boards. You must buy the entire board at whatever length they say it is, even when it falls short of what they’re billing you for. The final huge issue is the layout. Since all boards are stacked on top of each other, you must remove a board to inspect it. All home centers and most lumber stores I have been to stack boards in front of one another, so you can search through them quickly.
This place is tough to review. I am a hobbyist woodworker and shopping for their hardwoods. They have a great selection of species and their prices are good. I really love that they publish their pricelist online. Their red oak is cheaper than Lowes and Home Depot. I especially love that they sell walnut, cherry, quartersawn white oak. The staff is friendly. I want to love the place, but my experience left much to be desired.
I can’t recommend the place without warning. Inspect the goods before buying. Bring a tape measure so you can figure out how much of the board you can actually use once you cut off the bark and major defects. Keep in mind that they will not sell partial boards.
They actively try to cheat you on hardwoods. I found multiple expensive hardwood boards where they rounded up or charged you for dimensional lumber with significant bark on it.
For most folks, dimensional lumber is surfaced on 4 sides and has no holes.
For Anderson McQuaid, that is not the case. They will sell you $ 200 1×12 boards with holes in the middle of the board big enough to stick 2 fingers through and have over a foot of the length with the bark still on.
Many of their boards which are not up to full width. For example, a 1×4 is .75×3.5″. They’ll sell you 14′ dimensional 1×4 boards where only 12′ is 3.5″ wide and the rest is 2.5 to 3.25″ and covered in bark. If you’re edge-​gluing boards, you have to cut off 2′, yet pay for it. This is acceptable for rough-​cut lumber, which is sold for significantly cheaper. however, Anderson McQuaid is selling dimensional lumber and charging you dimensional lumber prices. In my opinion, it is fraudulent to charge someone for 14′ of 1×4 if only 12 of those feet are even close to 3.5″ wide.
I just built a desk from their lumber. I had to factor in somewhere between $ 30 and $ 50 of lost material due to their questionable billing. The loss was from them charging me for dimensional boards with bark on them and holes larger than 1″. Had I known of a better place to get walnut in my area, I would have gone elsewhere.
The other major issue with their hardwoods is that you should expect to be there for a very long time. For a lot of their stock, you cannot inspect the material yourself as it is on their upper floor. For their ground floor stock, everything is piled on top of each other. You cannot see the face of the board unless you pull it out and inspect it. The place is not particularly well lit either. This is a tedious process. For the project where I ended up wasting all that money, it took me 2h just to find enough boards that were close enough to suitable for use.
Another example is that I like their red oak prices, but when I shop for oak, I am picky about the grain and only consider 5−10% of the boards candidates for purchase, let alone the boards I want for my piece. Since they don’t keep their stock face forward, I may just pay a bit more to go somewhere else where I can find nice-​grained boards much more quickly.
So in conclusion, you can get good wood there, but it requires diligence on your part. However, their unethical overbilling is keeping me from enthusiastically recommending them.

Love this Place!!! I looked everywhere for moldings made of a wood other than the standard home depot type and this place is the only place that carries them. You also don’t need to be a contractor to get in and the service is great. I originally bought the poplar wood moldings from home depot and tried to stain them and they looked terrible. Except for the oak moldings, all Home Depot moldings seem to be of paintable grade. This place has a great variety of specialty and unique moldings that makes it worth the trip to Cambridge.

Anderson & McQuaid is an amazing resource for pros and for DIY homeowners. There are two main sections of the store: precut moldings and hardwoods/​exotic lumber. Their standard moldings are made from poplar which is a relatively inexpensive hardwood that is good if you are planning on painting your molding. The prices are excellent. To give a comparison to the Home Creapo pricing: Colonial casing molding in hardwood poplar was about half the price of the same profile shape in pine at the Depot. You can dent the pine with your fingernail but you really have to bang a piece of poplar to dent it.
They will match custom moldings from your house (for a premium) and they also stock lots of molding in different species. The prices for flat stock of hardwoods from various species are the best prices I have found without driving to New Hampshire or Maine. I haven’t seen any rough cut lumber, so pretty much everything is planed smooth and ready to take a finish.
If you don’t know much about lumber read up of the differences between lineal footage (length) and board footage (12″ x 12″ x 1″) and the nominal sizes of quarters like ⁴⁄₄ (4 quarters of an inch rough cut to more like ¾ of an inch planed down). There are tons of web resources explaining this stuff. The folks that work there are super friendly and helpful and won’t eat you alive if you’re a newbie.

It’s true this place really kicks the crap out of Home Depot. I don’t know anything about the exotic hard woods that the other review talks about. Not one aspect of my design would call for such a thing. It’s cheap trim and moulding to fill in drafts and mismatched windows and walls. If it were a perfect world of structure and sustainability people would trim their windows, ceilings and lower walls with aloe plants or jolly ranchers, but I guess for now I must use wood. But this place is the place to get trim.
I will shop here while I anxiously awaiting MDF to become more eco-​friendly. When this happens I really really hope these guys kick Home Depot’s ass once again!
But this is all coming from a girl who grew up in a geodesic dome.

If you are renovating, this shop has great decorative wood trim for the home. The merchandise savagely out classes the crap at Home Despot. If you are building, the selection of exotic hardwoods is phenomenal