The Right Questions When Buying Wood - Part I

A 100% Pure Wood Home for Children

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Natural Wood vs. Treated Wood

Working only with natural wood protection has several advantages. Natural wood will provide a healthy and long-lasting usage of buildings and also eliminates expensive and complicated products. Here is an excerpt from a tender brief from an engineer's office:
"The existing wooden balconies have, despite consistent maintenance and treatment with commercial chemical wood preservatives, fully rotted away. The main reason is the disregard of constructive measures to protect the wood. It also suggests that chemical wood preservatives do not effectively protect external wood, however, it does turn wood into toxic waste."

In addition, this brief went on to prescribe the demolition and the expensive disposal of the toxic waste. The newly erected balconies were made of alpine larch which has been harvested at the right season and moon phase, such as Thoma Holz100. The homeowner could have saved a lot of money had he used natural wood preservation methods along with high quality wood.

Now then, how can we make this movement from treated to natural wood?

The Right Questions When Buying Wood

Imagine you want to replace an old carpet with a wooden floor. You would visit a building supply or parquetry distributor where you can choose between different colours, qualities, and price.

Convenience is often seen as a positive quality and most likely, you will be able to take your new laminated flooring material home straight away. However, ask yourself these:

• Do you know where this wood came from?
• Has it been imported from overseas, the tropics, Russia or the far north?
• Do you know the components and surface treatment of the laminates?
• Is your floor releasing toxic fumes?
• Is this material safely compostable and biodegradable?
• Can it be burned without being harmful to humans and the environment?

Nowadays, in Europe, there are wood suppliers who can even provide photographs of the forest where the wood for your flooring has grown. Perhaps you would like to see and absorb the environment from where it came from.

It is best if you can treat your floors with natural resins and/or beeswax instead of sealing it with synthetic applications. Then you can be sure that your floor can return to nature and stay in the natural cycle. No matter if you want to buy a bedside table or build a whole family house in wood, to attain the wood quality we are talking about in Holz100, it is helpful to think about the following questions, before you choose your supplier.

In the next article, we will examine these questions in detail.