And We Say We're Not Living in Trees Anymore.

A typical new wood-framed home uses about 15,000 board feet of lumber. The Census Bureau said that there were 1,635,900 one-unit houses completed in 2005. That translates into about 24.5 million board feet of lumber.

By the way, a board foot is a piece of lumber that is -- or has equivalent volume to one that is -- one foot long, one foot wide, and one inch thick.

If all the lumber for those new houses was molded into one plank that was one foot wide and one inch thick, it would extend more than 4.6 million miles.