Reclaimed lumber is used wood that has been taken for reuse. Often this is wood from buildings that have long stood idle, and it is sometimes refinished for new purposes. Most reclaimed lumber comes from timbers and decking rescued from old barns, factories, and warehouses. Some companies have been known to source wood from less traditional structures, such as boxcars, coal mines, and wine barrels. Reclaimed or antique lumber is used primarily for decoration and home building and is often used for siding, architectural details, cabinetry, furniture, and flooring.
Wood Origins
In the United States, wood once functioned as the primary building material because it was strong, relatively inexpensive, and abundant. Today many of the woods that were once plentiful are only available in large qualities through reclamation. One common reclaimed wood, longleaf pine, was used in factories and warehouses built during the Industrial Revolution. Longleaf heart pine was once the most functional wood for construction in the US. It was slow-growing (taking 200 to 400 years to mature), tall, straight, and resistant to mold and insects. More importantly, it was abundant. Longleaf yellow pine grew in thick forests that spanned over 140,000 square miles.
Another previously common wood for building was American chestnut. Beginning in 1904, a chestnut blight spread across the US and killed billions of American chestnut trees. Before the wood was destroyed, it was used to build barns and other structures. This wood was thereby preserved for later reuse when these structures were dismantled.
Barns serve as one of the most common sources for reclaimed wood in the US. Barns constructed up through the early part of the 19th century were typically built using whatever trees were right there on the property. They often contain a mixed blend of oak, chestnut, and other woods including poplar, hickory, and pine. Beam sizes were limited to what could be moved by man and horse. The wood was either hand hewn using an axe or squared with an adze. Early settlers also recognized the oak from its European subspecies. Soon red, white, black, scarlet, willow, post, and pin oak varieties were being cut and transformed into barns too.
Mill buildings throughout the Southeast also provide an abundant source of reclaimed wood. Some of these buildings and complexes comprise more than a million square feet of floor space, and can yield three to five times that amount of board feet of flooring. These buildings also often have no economic or reuse possibility. They can be a fire hazard, and can require varying degrees of environmental cleanup. Reclaiming lumber and brick from retired mills puts these materials to a good use and keeps them from ending up in a landfill.
Properties of Reclaimed Lumber
Reclaimed lumber is popular for many reasons: the wood’s unique appearance; its contribution to green building; the history of the wood’s origins; and the wood’s physical characteristics, such as strength, stability, and durability. Reclaimed beams can be sawn into wider planks than the harvested lumber. Many companies also purport that their products are more stable than newly cut wood because reclaimed wood has been exposed to changes in humidity for far longer. The better stability makes the reclaimed products suitable for use with radiant heating systems. In some cases, the timbers from which the boards were cut have been slightly expanding and contracting for over a century in their previous installation. Radiant heat, with its low temperatures and even distribution, affects the wood flooring the same way, but the impact is much less dramatic with antique wood than with newly sawn wood since antique wood has already been through this cycle for years.
Reclaimed Lumber Industry
The reclaimed lumber industry gained momentum in the early 1980s on the West Coast when large-scale reuse of softwoods began. The industry grew due to a growing concern about environmental impact as well as a declining quality in new lumber. On the East Coast, industry pioneers began selling reclaimed wood in the early 1970s, but the industry stayed mostly small until the 1990s, when waste disposal began to increase and deconstruction became the more economically savvy alternative to demolition.
LEED
The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System is the US Green Building Council's (USGBC’s) benchmark for designing, building, and operating green buildings. To become certified, projects must first meet the prerequisites designated by the USGBC and then earn a certain number of credits within the following six categories: sustainable sites, water efficiency, energy and atmosphere, materials and resources, indoor environmental quality, innovation and design process. Using reclaimed wood can earn credits toward achieving LEED project certification. Because reclaimed wood is considered recycled content, it meets the materials and resources criteria for LEED certification, and because some reclaimed lumber products are FSC certified, they can qualify for LEED credits under the “certified wood” category.
Drawbacks
With a growing number of competitors, it is becoming difficult to find high-quality used wood. With such a high demand, some sellers try to pass newer wood off as antique. Reclaimed lumber is typically more expensive than new lumber primarily due to expenses associated with dismantling, sorting, and preparing the wood. Reclaimed lumber sometimes has pieces of metal embedded in it, such as broken off nails, so planing it can often ruin planer blades. Nail-compatible saw blades can be used to help avoid this problem, and also to improve safety.
External Links
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Reclaimed lumber."
