Carpentry

Carpentry is a skilled trade and a craft in which the primary work performed is the cutting, shaping and installation of building materials during the construction of buildings, ships, timber bridges, concrete formwork, etc. Carpenters traditionally worked with natural wood and did rougher work such as framing, but today many other materials are also used and sometimes the finer trades of cabinetmaking and furniture building are considered carpentry. In the United States, 98.5% of carpenters are male, and it was the fourth most male-dominated occupation in the country in 1999. In 2006 in the United States, there were about 1.5 million carpentry positions. Carpenters are usually the first tradesmen on a job and the last to leave. Carpenters normally framed post-and-beam buildings until the end of the 19th century; now this old-fashioned carpentry is called timber framing. Carpenters learn this trade by being employed through an apprenticeship training—normally four years—and qualify by successfully completing that country's competence test in places such as the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Switzerland, Australia and South Africa. It is also common that the skill can be learned by gaining work experience other than a formal training program, which may be the case in many places.

Carpentry covers various services, such as furniture design and construction, door and window installation or repair, flooring installation, trim and molding installation, custom woodworking, stair construction, structural framing, wood structure and furniture repair, and restoration.

The word "carpenter" is the English rendering of the Old French word carpentier (later, charpentier) which is derived from the Latin carpentarius [artifex], "(maker) of a carriage." The Middle English and Scots word (in the sense of "builder") was wright (from the Old English wryhta, cognate with work), which could be used in compound forms such as wheelwright or boatwright.

In the UK, carpentry is used to describe the skill involved in first fixing of timber items such as construction of roofs, floors and timber framed buildings, i.e. those areas of construction that are normally hidden in a finished building. An easy way to envisage this is that first fix work is all that is done before plastering takes place. The second fix is done after plastering takes place. Second fix work, the installation of items such as skirting boards, architraves, doors, and windows are generally regarded as carpentry, however, the off-site manufacture and pre-finishing of the items is regarded as joinery. Carpentry is also used to construct the formwork into which concrete is poured during the building of structures such as roads and highway overpasses. In the UK, the skill of making timber formwork for poured or in situ concrete is referred to as shuttering.

Carpentry in the United States is historically defined similarly to the United Kingdom as the "heavier and stronger" work distinguished from a joiner "...who does lighter and more ornamental work than that of a carpenter..." although the "...work of a carpenter and joiner are often combined." Joiner is less common than the terms finish carpenter or cabinetmaker. The terms housewright and barnwright were used historically and are now occasionally used by carpenters who work using traditional methods and materials. Someone who builds custom concrete formwork is a form carpenter.

Along with stone, wood is among the oldest building materials. The ability to shape it into tools, shelter, and weapons improved with technological advances from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. Some of the oldest archaeological evidence of carpentry are water well casings. These include an oak and hazel structure dating from 5256 BC, found in Ostrov, Czech Republic, and one built using split oak timbers with mortise and tenon and notched corners excavated in eastern Germany, dating from about 7,000 years ago in the early Neolithic period.

Relatively little history of carpentry was preserved before written language. Knowledge and skills were simply passed down over the generations. Even the advent of cave painting and writing recorded little. The oldest surviving complete architectural text is Vitruvius' ten books collectively titled De architectura, which discuss some carpentry.^{[citation needed]} It was only with the invention of the printing press in the 15th century that this began to change, albeit slowly, with builders finally beginning to regularly publish guides and pattern books in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Some of the oldest surviving wooden buildings in the world are temples in China such as the Nanchan Temple built in 782, Greensted Church in England, parts of which are from the 11th century, and the stave churches in Norway from the 12th and 13th centuries.