As a carpenter I have to buy a lot of timber and it's more expensive than you think.
This little lot of wood in the picture above was the best part of £300, although it is oak and planned to size for me, some for a job in the next village and some for our house.
So my message for this post is that if you have a tree that you think you could plank, make sure you do rather than cutting it for firewood. Even if you sell the timber once it's done the value will be much higher than firewood.
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| On a axe workshop and chainsaw milling course a few years ago |
Although it seems expensive to get someone in to plank it with a mobile mill it works out to be a good investment once you've left it to dry for a few years. Also this way it can normally be milled on site and then each piece is easier to move meaning there is no need for big machinery. There are hundreds of varieties of trees that make great timber with lots of uses; like Larch for cladding or Ash for furniture, the list just goes on and on.
Has anyone else milled their own timber and gotten good results? There are no trees here that would make good timber so I'll have to keep buying mine for now!
I have a friend who lives in the middle of France, and she purchased a woodland a couple of years ago. She has then proceeded to cut down the trees, including some old oaks. Some she has used for firewood, the rest she has taken to the local saw mill (of which there are many in France) for planking. She is now using the wood to renovate the house she has recently moved in to, one of her major projects being to make an oak kitchen and oak veranda. I think she is a marvel, but we would never use our old oak, walnut, or ash trees for such a task, so we buy all the wood we need from our local saw mill which is just round the corner to where we live, and then leave our trees standing! Anyway, they act as a barrier to the river when the river is running in flood mode, although the majority of English people who visit us are forever telling us that we are foolish to buy fire wood when we have all those trees we could use!
ReplyDeleteI think in the UK we have a difficulty seeing trees for what they were planted for. They were planted as a crop to be harvested when they were ready. Now we like to see lots of old trees but not plant too many new ones. It's tricky here getting people to take a small amount to be millde but more and more people have got mobile mills so it's getting easier to get those trees planked up.
DeleteWhy not harvest a few and plant twice as many to replace them? Your friend sounds like she's got a good thing going there. I'd love to buy a wood and a mill one day but I don't think thats ever going to happen so I'll just keep planting trees here for lots of different uses!
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DeleteI know a man who cuts up old telegraph poles and points them with his Massey Ferguson tractor powered saw. He's also got a dynamo attached to a river that powers his farm engineer workshop and even sells some of his electricity to the electric companies. Every river should have water wheels to provide power to mills to cut wood and grind flour.
ReplyDeleteMy corner and gate posts are all old telegraph poles, they seem to last forever! No river by here (mind you with all the flooding lately thats a good thing) but I bet its great to get free power from it. I know someone who's done it but they haven't got permission so it's all a bit hush hush. Not harming anyone but there is no way he's be allowed to do it!
DeleteIt always grieves me to see skips full of useable wood, surely we should have more wood recycling places. When we had our allotment we were always skipping. :-)
ReplyDeleteBriony
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Some of the big sites that I've worked on in the past chuck away huge amounts of wood, all to go to landfill. Its crazy really, more should be done to give away what not needed.
DeleteLiving in a state that's 80% forested, it's hard for me to fathom a place with a reasonable climate where trees are so rare. I guess that's what thousands of years of "civilization" does to the land.
ReplyDeleteThey're not rare by any stretch of the imagination, just people don't use them to their full potential. I live in a county covered in trees but finding English oak to use would be very difficult.
DeleteThat's interesting. I am a carpenter's child and grew up with racks of timber in the shed, wood shavings and sawdust everywhere and the sound of sawing and saw sharpening as my soundtrack but I never thought of the cost of it. It was just THERE!
ReplyDeleteMaybe my kids will grow up thinking the same. I'd like to think in years to come some sights, sounds and smells will make them think of me doing my trade.
DeleteI'm sure they will. And yes, the smell of frweshly sawn timber; I could use it as perfume!
DeleteOnly some timber. Green oak smells a little like cow muck to me!
DeleteThere are a couple folks around me with portable sawmills. They will come over to your place and saw up a few trees at at time. Of course the bane of the portable sawmill is nails and fence wire in your oak trees. The fellow I know really does not like to cut up oak that has been in a pasture.
ReplyDeleteI live in Oregon which is a state that had a huge renewable timber industry until various special interests shut it down. Now we have low paying tourist jobs and wineries.
I prefer breweries...
"If god gives you a fence post you use it" I remember a farmer saying to my brother and me once. "not if you've got to chop down the tree you don't" was my brothers reply!
DeleteI prefer cider..
Talking about skipping, I like to build nestboxes and there is a skip along from us that some builders chuck their old stuff into. The other day I spotted some bits of wood, just offcuts from what I think they were using as new skirting boards, just what looked like plain ordinary 6x1 pine. Anyway, I asked the carpenter there if I could nick his offcuts and he said fine, go ahead. They were only small bits, the longest about 14" but enough to make nestboxes out of so I was delighted and grabbed all I could. But what I was amazed at was the weight of them, twice as heavy as the pine bits I have at home, and although they look exactly the same in colour and grain, could they be oak or something else? Or might the water content greater than the oldish bits I already have? What do you think Kev?
ReplyDeleteSome wood you buy now feels so full of water you'd think it was still growing that same week! We had some 4x2 the other week and I could only lift one lenght at a time! The grain and colour would be different if it was oak, You should tell if you hold them both side by side.
DeleteWe pay about US$600 per cubic metre sawn for mahogany. There are plenty of people cutting it but very few people planting.
ReplyDeleteI'll have to find out what it is here for a comparison. Although be tend to use sapelle here or another cheap hardwood.
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ReplyDeleteWe have our huge old oak that is lying on the hillside all ready to be planked soon. Lovely Hubby has plans for that wood in a couple of years.
ReplyDeleteJust make sure you dry it right and it'll be worth loads and it's so good to make something with wood thats come from your own land!
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