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"You'd have to be very wealthy to afford the lumber quality (even the lumber under the floors and inside walls was excellent by modern standards) and the woodwo
by rsync 10y ago
"You'd have to be very wealthy to afford the lumber quality (even the lumber under the floors and inside walls was excellent by modern standards) and the woodwork in that house these days, assuming you could even find such without simply ripping it out of an older house."
This meme about old wood and big wood and scarcity, etc., is oft-repeated, but I find it's not true.
Granted, there are some very specific woods that you can't buy new (old growth redwood, etc.) but you will have no problem at all picking up the phone and buying kiln-dried 12x12 beams, 24 feet long, etc., etc. ... no problem at all.
And they're not really that expensive, either. We had to buy a lot of 8x12 KD doug fir beams and 8x12 KD cedar beams for a barn renovation this past year and it wasn't budget-busting.
- Retric 10y agoFaster growing trees make worse wood. Tree farms flood the market with cheap wood that's vastly worse from a materials perspective than old growth. A 24 foot long beam of high quality wood takes ~300 years to grow, 'nobody has time for that'. At the high end ebony costs ~150x the cost of pine, though there are cheaper related species. It's also dense enough to sink in water. Mostly you find Gaboon ebony which while pricey is mostly comparable. http://www.woodworkerssource.com/shop/category/ebony_gaboon.html http://www.woodworkerssource.com/shop/category/ebony_gaboon....
- b_emery 10y agoCase in point: the floors of my 95 yr old house are douglas fir. The grain spacing is about 2 mm. Try finding douglas fir like that at home depot.
- Spooky23 10y agoThe finishing millwork stuff is crazy. We had an insect infestation on our front porch behind the beadboard. I pulled it out to get rid of the ants, and some jerk stole it from my driveway. Replacing those boards would cost something like $5,000 today.