ThomD
>I wouldn't say you can't have an infestation, I mostly didn't coment on it because it would depend on more info than I have.

First is the fact that other source "factory" wood is not imune to infestation, even if it was kill dried, it can spend a lot of time out of doors loafing around before you buy it.

Your main defence is that you will get to examine the wood carefully while you work it. And cedar is resistant to pests. The thing that would worry one the most is the presence of nail damage that is simply difficult to inspect. maybe these could be cut out and plugged, or cut around.

Do you have a lot of insect or rot damage in the structure, though even then, what happens in one piece may not migrate to another, particularly if you had, say, pressure treated post and cedar decking, then the conditions for life are totally different. In the old days when wood was harvested from the forest directly, it wasn't unusual to find mixtures of species in the house. On disassembly the rot and insect damage can be very specific to individual pieces.

That raises another point, mostly theoretical for me. Most of the spcies around here are not going to be all that tragic, you do have to factor in whether you have the risc of bringing into the home something really terrifying. There are termites, and there are termites, but if you live in a reasonable environment without a lot of invassive super species, I wouldn't worry.

One thing that did provoke my spiddie senses was the fact that this structure was painted. That is unusual with cedar, because it doesn't always take paint well, and it does not need it. Paint can cause problems by differentially holding water in or letting it in. It also makes me wonder how good the underlying wood is. There are also serious environmental issues to removing paint. Such as you wouldn't want to sand away a ton of lead paint in order to salvage a few bucks of wood. While lead is an obvious issue other paints have largely undisclosed junk in them. With thick material where faces could be bandsawn away with good dust collection to good filters... There are also risks to rot, if you have to process that too.

Paint and toxics aside, if you can end up with stuff that looks like "factory wood" that is usually good enough for me.