"Board Feet: Totaling a Full Lumber Order" is lesson 5 of 7 in the General Building (B) Learning Hub. It opens with "One Board's Formula (Quick Review)" and works through 5 short steps, then a worked example you can check yourself against.
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The worked example in the course applies this lesson to a realistic job.
Board feet for one board = (thickness in inches x width in inches x length in feet) / 12. This gives the volume of a single piece - see the Board Feet lesson in the universal set for the full walkthrough. Ordering lumber for a real job means doing this once for EVERY distinct board size you need, then adding all of them together.
A framing package is never one board size - it's a list: so many 2x4x8s for studs, so many 2x6x10s for headers, so many 2x8x12s for joists, and so on. Each line item needs its own board-feet-per-piece calculation, multiplied by the QUANTITY of that size needed, before adding every line together.
For each size on the order: find board feet for ONE piece of that size, then multiply by how many pieces of that exact size you need. That gives the board-foot total for that single line item on the order.
The remaining 2 steps, the worked example and the quiz are in the course. This is a preview. The full lesson, with the step-by-step explanations, a worked example and a quick-check quiz, is inside the classroom.
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