When dealing with timber structures, the characteristic strength and stiffness of the material are made highly variable and uncertain by the unavoidable, yet hardly predictable, presence of knots and other defects. In this work, we apply the sparse grids stochastic collocation method to perform uncertainty quantification for structural engineering in the scenario described above. Sparse grids have been developed by the mathematical community in the last decades, and their theoretical background has been rigorously and extensively studied. The document proposes a brief practice-oriented introduction with minimal theoretical background, provides detailed instructions for the use of the off-the-shelf Sparse Grid Matlab kit (freely available online and straightforward to use) and discusses two preliminary examples inspired from timber engineering problems that highlight how sparse grids exhibit superior performances compared to the plain Monte Carlo method. •An Uncertainty Quantification methodology is applied to timber-like structures.•IGA collocation is used for solving the equilibrium equations.•Smolyak and adaptive sparse grids are used for managing random parameters.•This methodology requires no coding effort and outperforms Monte Carlo.