I've spent the last few days looking at saw mill operations both online and in my surrounding community. In Len Charney's book, "Build a yurt," he suggests that mills are a good place to find nearly free 1x2" lumber for khanas and even cheap larger pieces of scrap lumber for the rafters. Granted the book was written in 1974 but I still expected to be able to find some freebies that would otherwise be going to the dump. This was not the case. Instead it seems that any scrap lumber is being sold as firewood or ground into saw dust. One of the men I spoke with informed me that he was making around $1,000 a week from the sale of his ground wood scrap. I am glad to see that the scrap is being used for something and not just ending up in the landfill in the same way that construction debris does. At the same time though this eliminates the primary source I had been expecting to be able to get cheap long cut lumber from.
If we were to buy the wood new, in rough cut pine or douglas fir, we could probably get everything we need for the yurt's frame for 2-3 hundred dollars. Feasible though this would be it does not really fit into the green design concepts. After all we are trying to do this in the most ecological way possible and I can not see where supporting the timber industry really follows our guiding construction principles.
I'm heavily leaning towards salvaged lumber but as one person put it "salvaged lumber is a good deal, provided you are the one doing the salvaging." From what I have found a lot of the lumber being sold from salvage operations is reclaimed antique hardwood which carries a heftier price than I would care to spend. In our most recent craigslist ad I offered to help dismantle existing structures, such as collapsing barns or outbuildings, in exchange for the lumber. In essence I would be conducting my own salvage operation. A single site could potentially provide all of the longer 6' and 16' wood beams we will need. Best of all no new trees would need to be cut.
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment