Why Do We Say Furring Out
I once was reading over a daily log in which the carpenter wrote that his solution to a problem was to “fir out the wall”. He’s a smart guy who doesn’t usually make spelling errors. It struck me that thinking of this particular task in terms of wood made perfect sense—aren’t you literally adding spruce-pine-fir to an existing structure?
Furring out is the act of adding extra wood to a structure to give it additional depth. It’s usually a 1x2 or 2x2 attached to the face of each stud to help make a wall flat, or make walls meet correctly, or to make room for something like a wire or pipe. We do it all the time in remodeling. But where does that term come from?
Furring strips
Back in the “old days”, when winter arrived, people would take their clothing to the furrier to get furred out. This meant attaching fur strips to the inside of a garment to give it extra warmth and depth. You’d get your skirt furred out, your coat furred out. It comes from the French word fourrer*, which means to line or sheath something.
Carpentry adopted the term because the action and result was essentially the same. While no one was literally nailing furs to the studs, the concept of adding thickness with extra padding was easily conveyed by using the same term for both carpentry and clothing. Overtime, the clothing industry switched from saying “furring out” to “lining”. Carpentry has expanded the term, however, and it’s not uncommon to hear “furring in” or “furring down”.
Strangely, carpentry does *also* have the phrase to “line out” but its origin bears no relationship to clothing.
So that’s why we say “furring out”.
*Careful though, because in modern quebecois vernacular “fourrer” now means to sheath...um, something else.
