Globalization, Home Depot and Wood Trim

For the last year or so one of our ongoing projects around the house has been to finish a room above the garage. Most of the larger jobs have been contracted out, but we're doing the finish work ourselves. My wife and I painted (I got the ceiling), I installed flooring during Thanksgiving week and am now doing the trim.

I went down to Home Depot a few days ago, bought a bunch of trim which matches the rest of the house, polyurethaned it over the course of a couple days and set about installing it today. You could drive yourself crazy trying to make this kind of thing perfect and I am trying to get it done in a finite amount of time, so I give myself some allowance for fit. However, when I started putting up the window trim I started to wonder if I was missing something fundamental.

When I bought the trim I had noticed it came from Chile, which struck me as a long way away to obtain Pine, but, well, ok. Then as I was polyurethaning I noticed some of it was from New Zealand too. Pine from the other side of the planet! Well, ok. Then when I went to take these pictures I noticed some was from Mexico too. Ok, that almost seems reasonable.

But all these origins are actually the problem.





The Pine from New Zealand (right), despite have identical SKU's was milled differently than the Pine from Chile (left) and Mexico. The thinnest part of the trim is significantly thicker on the NZ Pine, and the profiles are ever so slightly different.



It doesn't look like much here, but when you put it up, this happens:





I had to run out today to get more trim, needless to say, I made sure it was all from the same country.