Posted 4th November 2024 by Mongers Admin
INTERNAL WOODWORK
Probably the most common re-use of building materials in any home will be internal timber. Whether it be an old door to replace one that has been damaged or twisted, a replacement floorboard where an impatient plumber has chopped a lump out of the floor or some feature piece of oak board used to make a shelf, many of us are familiar with repurposing the odd bit of wood. We wanted, in our build, to take this a bit further and use as much reclaimed timber as possible in our house, including cladding walls and ceilings as well as making kitchens wardrobes and cupboards out of old wood.
It has been a while since I have posted any updates from our New Reclaimed House. It is not because we have been idle but because there is a stage in all builds where those items that are not going to be reclaimed need to be fitted. First fix electrics and plumbing, insulation of the roof, much of the wall coverings and plaster. I decided that since this blog is about the reclaimed elements of the house not to describe it here. At one stage I had thought that I might avoid the need to use much plasterboard by utilising wooden wall coverings, but pragmatic view was that it is simpler to ensure meeting fire regulations by applying our cladding over plasterboard. We also were mindful that without plasterboard there was a chance that we may have small gaps in our wall coverings. It is very possible to meet fire regulations without utilising a fire-retardant wall covering but this, in some cases, would have involved treating the timber. Something that I was not averse to but involves an extra process that we would not have been able to do easily on site. One of the first considerations that I had when embarking on this project was to keep the tradesmen on side, which means not putting them too far out of their comfort zone, and keeping the building constructed in a fairly established method. I wanted to avoid huge delays caused by unavailability of items or endless checks on suitability of materials.
We had a wood workshop at one time through which we processed a large amount of reclaimed wood to make floorboards including acres of roofboards from some very large aircraft hangers at a local second world war bomber airfield. After closing the workshops, largely due to the amount of effort that was required to keep them profitable, I have always had in storage a lot of hard to sell pine boards. Floorboards are a major commodity in the reclamation trade, always in short supply and can command a good price for a decent batch of quality boards. However reclaimed roof timbers and wall claddings, that are painted or treated prove much harder to reuse, and, without a workshop that is designed to deal with what is a potentially unpleasant process, hard to convert into usable wood. Hence, I had accumulated a large quantity of timber that was always going to be hard to sell.
Amongst the timber stored in one of my barns was a large batch of painted tongue and groove roofboards. These were bought from an auction in Essex many years ago when they were included in a lot with other timber. We sold all the wood that could easily be reused, but I could never really justify the effort required to turn these boards into usable flooring. I calculated that we needed about 70 sq m to clad all my roof in the main part of the building. There appeared to be enough, but we would need to take care not to have too much wastage and to do the large adjacent areas first so that, if we were short, we could use an alternative in other rooms. The carpenters used almost every usable piece, and we ripped down the split lengths to make boxing around some of the building’s original steel. We had enough, just!
The boards were scraped and sanded outside during the good weather in the summer, well away from the building site. It is very important to be wary of the content of the paint that you are sanding. Safety equipment and ventilation being the key. The resultant finish, after the flaking and loose paint had been removed was quite attractive. Initially it was thought that these boards would be painted, however, we decided to put them up first and see if we liked the effect, which we do. These are now going to get two coats of a matt water-based varnish. We plan to clad other areas in different timber, of which some will definitely be painted.
DOORS
What can you say about reclaimed doors? Every salvage yard probably has hundreds of doors that are the wrong size for your opening, which is why it is easy to source and use old doors on a new build. You make the openings to fit the doors rather than fit doors to the openings. We are using some simple, but good quality four panel doors from the 1950’s throughout most of the house. They are taller than standard, but that suits most of the places that we are using them. We will be converting one into a fire door, but more about that later and we have saved a rather special Victorian door for the loo!
We could make the door linings from reclaimed wood but without a workshop with the right machinery I have decided against this, but we will be using reclaimed wood for mouldings and skirtings.