How to get lumber to craft Player Housing decor

Player Housing Early Access is now live in WoW, and one of the many things now on our to-do list is to harvest the lumber required to craft decor items. All of the non-gathering professions have recipes that will be (fairly) painless to learn across each of World of Warcraft’s twelve expansions. But in addition to various reagents from the relevant expansion, you’ll need enough of the expansion-specific lumber to craft a decor item. Luckily, this isn’t too much of a gathering headache (though it is slow). Let’s take a look at what we know about acquiring the lumber we’ll need for all of our crafty housing needs: here’s how to earn lumber to craft Player Housing decor.

After the initial Player Housing tutorial, a lumberjack NPC will pop up in the town square of your Neighborhood: Lestia Goldenstrike for Alliance and Xiz’ro for Horde. (Look for a purple quest marker in the downtown area to find them.) Once you complete their quest, you can then click on them again to buy a Harvesting Hatchet, which is an item which allows you to toggle lumber appearing on your minimap. (Note that the option is initially toggled on when you buy the item, so clicking the hatchet after purchase will toggle it off again.) With the option toggled on, little yellow logs on your minimap will alert you to nearby nodes just like tracking herbs or ore. Alts can buy a hatchet from that same lumberjack for 25 gold.

As you would expect, lumber can be found on trees. This poses a logistical problem for zones throughout Azeroth that lack forested areas. In those cases, you’ll find lumber in some unexpected places. For example, you can harvest Dornic Fir Lumber from areas across Khaz Algar. It’s found on the trees of places like Hallowfall, but also on the mushrooms and flowers that sprout in Azj-Kahet.

Currently each node of lumber, which appears as a golden axe embedded in a tree (or tree-like growth), gives between 1 and 3 lumber. But trees are most likely to be worth one lumber each, which can make this a slow grind. Each expansion has its own special lumber that is used across all professions for crafting decor, so you’ll need to farm expansion specific zones to collect what you need. Here are the different types of lumber available:

• Ironwood Lumber (Classic)
• Olemba Lumber (The Burning Crusade)
• Coldwind Lumber (Wrath of the Lich King)
• Ashwood Lumber (Cataclysm)
• Bamboo Lumber (Mists of Pandaria)
• Fel-Touched Lumber (Legion)
• Darkpine Lumber (Battle for Azeroth)
• Arden Lumber (Shadowlands)
• Dragonpine Lumber (Dragonflight)
• Dornic Fir Lumber (The War Within)

Lumber is Warbound, meaning there won’t be a market for it on the Auction House but you will be able to swap it around between all of your alts in order to maximize your crafting efficiency. You can also place Work Orders for decor items, if none of your alts has the required profession but the Auction House prices are too steep.

How much lumber you’ll need to craft an item varies wildly. Smaller items might need just 5 or 6, while big-ticket centerpieces can require up to fifty. You should be able to harvest all of the lumber you’ll need for a given item fairly quickly given how frequent the nodes are currently scattered around the Midnight beta, but the real rub will come when you decide you need multiple copies of your favorite item. If every corner of your yard needs an Arcan’dor Cutting Fountain, then you’ll need a whole pallet of Fel-Touched Lumber from the Broken Isles.

Now there’s nothing to do but get farming, both for lumber and other old world reagents required for decor crafting. Good luck gathering all of the materials you need!

Originally published November 21, 2025; updated December 5, 2025.