Fur: Strips, Not Softness

Outside the trade, fur is the dense coat of hair that covers mammals. It keeps animals warm and dry. In construction, the word has nothing to do with animals. To fur a surface is to apply furring to it, which means to attach thin strips of wood or metal to a wall, ceiling, or floor to level it, create an air gap, or provide a base for fastening.

Furring strips are typically 1 inch by 2 inches or 1 inch by 3 inches in cross-section. A worker nails or screws them to an uneven substrate, spacing them at regular intervals, often 16 inches apart on center. The strips compensate for dips and irregularities in the underlying surface. Once the furring is in place, drywall, insulation, or finish materials can be attached to the strips instead of to the rough substrate. This creates a level plane and also leaves a cavity between the original surface and the new one, useful for running pipes, wires, or mechanical systems.

The word likely borrowed from an older sense of fur meaning to line or cover. In medieval English, to fur a garment was to line it with fur fabric. The construction sense seems to have evolved in the 19th or early 20th century, carrying the idea of adding a layer on top of an existing surface. The strips themselves came to be called furring or furring pieces.

In industrial printing, furniture serves a completely different purpose but uses a related metaphor. Furniture in that context means the wooden or metal pieces arranged around a page of type to create margins and fill empty space in the chase, the frame that holds type for printing. Both furring and printing furniture are spacers and levelers, but one works on building surfaces and the other on the flatbed of a press.