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NY Times article on submerged log salvaging

Started by TomFromStLouis, April 21, 2005, 09:18:38 PM

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TomFromStLouis

As you might expect, the Times takes the rich client viewpoint on using salvaged timber, so I thought you might find their story interesting:

http://nytimes.com/2005/04/21/garden/21wood.html

DanG

Well, phooey!  It wouldn't let me in 'cause I ain't a NY Times member.  Guess I won't never see it, then. :-\
"I don't feel like an old man.  I feel like a young man who has something wrong with him."  Dick Cavett
"Beat not thy sword into a plowshare, rather beat the sword of thine enemy into a plowshare."

WH_Conley

Bill

Paschale

You can register for free, which I did a long time ago.  Interesting story, and worth registering for. 
Y'all can pronounce it "puh-SKOLLY"

TomFromStLouis

Dredged From the Deep, Pickled Paneling
By JOYCE WADLER

T'S an exhausting thing, being a luxury-home owner.

You have the 42,000-square-foot house; so does the guy next door. You have the dedicated home theater; so does the guy next door. Which is why, according to the head of sales of Cuvée Storage Systems, a builder of custom wine cellars, old growth timber that has been lying at the bottom of a lake for 100 years or more has been such a boon.

Sure, there are other reasons for the growing popularity of river-recovered wood, which, at a cost of two to two-and-a-half times as much as new-growth wood, may be the Kobe beef of the lumber world. There is the superior quality of old-growth timber and the fact that the material is environmentally sound, since it involves no new logging. There is what the builders at Cuvée, a New Hampshire company whose wine cellars average between $100,000 and $150,000, claim are the special qualities of long-submerged logs: resistance to moisture, concretelike strength, unusual coloring.

But even better is the romance of the wood, which in the case of Cuvée comes from a Wisconsin company called Timeless Timber. Their wood, the spiel goes, was harvested during the logging boom of the 1800's, or even earlier, on the shores of the Great Lakes and in Canada. Their wood was hand hewn, then sent downriver to the sawmills, sinking en route or during pileups at the mill. Their wood, in some rare but marketable instances, bears the Colonial stamp of the King of England or France, or may even carry a musketball.

"Before, if you wanted a wine room better than the one next door, rather than a 2,000-bottle wine cellar, I could do 2,500," said Brian Crowley, Cuvée's director for sales. Now, Mr. Crowley and Cuvée's president, Paul Fugere, can give their clients history: Your neighbor has an 1,800-bottle wine cellar? Well, yours is made out of 800-year-old wood, maybe 1,500-year-old wood. It's like an instant antique.

And the clients don't even need to memorize that history in order to recite it to their guests: they receive a plaque, which can be mounted on the wall.

Old-growth timber has always been prized by builders and cabinetmakers. Trees in the virgin woods, which grew close together and competed for sunshine and water, grew slowly. That slow growth created closely spaced rings that gave the wood a tighter grain and made it strong and dense.

"I got a sample of new pine, and in the couple months I had it sitting on my desk it curled up like a potato chip," said Michael McCaffery, an architect who chose riverbed pine from the Goodwin Heart Pine Company for an East Hampton, N.Y., client's floor. "The old-growth sample, I have it here, it's like a rock. No cupping, no distortion, perfectly flat and dense. And beautiful."

In recent years, old-growth timber has been salvaged from old barns, bridges and industrial barrels - and, increasingly, rivers and lakes. With submerged timber - the logs are called "sinkers" - divers are the lumberjacks, attaching a chain or a rope to a log. Timeless Timber, on the south shore of Lake Superior, got its start when divers, looking for shipwrecks about 15 years ago, kept bumping into logs that had been abandoned when a sawmill burned to the ground nearly a century earlier.

Contrary to what one might expect, much submerged lumber does not rot: Low levels of oxygen slow down decay, according to Timeless Timber's president, David Neitzke. The cold waters of the North are also a deterrent. And lying in a riverbed or at the bottom of a lake, the wood can attain an unusual patina, which in some cases may come from minerals or clay.

Alex Wilson, the publisher of the BuildingGreen newsletter, says he knows of about half a dozen firms that are dealing with recovered river-bottom timber. But it's difficult to know for sure how many there are, because, as with any rare commodity, suppliers are protective of their sources. Timeless Timber subcontracts to small underwater logging outfits from Idaho to New Brunswick, but Mr. Neitzke is not about to disclose the specific suppliers or sites. Nor will George Goodwin of Goodwin Heart Pine, who points out that a log isn't yours just because you've tagged it - you've got to recover it and take it to a river landing.

The South Mountain Company, an architecture and building firm on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts that makes both luxury and low-income housing on the Vineyard, uses a good deal of river-bottom cypress and Southern yellow pine from Georgia and the northern Florida panhandle. John Abrams, the firm's president, said it comes from one supplier, who salvages in the Choctawhatchee River. Mr. Abrams won't reveal his supplier's name, but he will offer a story. All recycled wood comes with a story, Mr. Abrams said, and his customers love a story.

"Around the turn of the century, much of the old-growth cypress in the South got logged," Mr. Abrams said. All the loggers "had their own brand, to stamp into the logs, and when this stopped, these brands ended up in barns and on mantle pieces."

His supplier began collecting brands, Mr. Abrams said, and realized that the logs he was finding sometimes matched those brands.

"A few years ago, the state of Georgia said the timber on the bottom of the river belongs to the state. He took them to court and on the court date, he walks in with a wheelbarrow full of little sections of woods and some of these brands. He says, 'Judge, I own these logs and here are my brands to prove it.' He won the case."

Recovered river wood is expensive, sometimes two to two and a half times as much as recent growth. To Bob Fields, a homeowner in Southborough, Mass., who runs an ad agency outside Boston and is the sort of fellow who will pay $700 for a sculptured wooden bowl and go on a rant about "stupid factory-made floors which almost look like they're plastic," that was unimportant. Mr. Fields said he spent $8,000 or $9,000 to do the "magnificent, mind-blowing floor" of his 1,200-square-foot master bedroom, an addition to his $2 million house. It's birch, he says, but not birch as you picture it.

"When the sunlight comes in, the floor is like a museum piece," Mr. Fields said. "Because these logs were soaking underwater for 200 or 300 years, they were soaking up the coloration of the clay bed. Some of the wood looks like black ebony."

"I go to some friends' houses - $800,000, a million, a million three - they've got floors that come out of some liquidator or Home Depot," he added. "These manufactured, sterile, nude, oven-baked floors. Who wants to eat vanilla ice cream every day?"

Richard Wright, who owns half a dozen Hallmark shops and lives in Dunedin, on the west coast of Florida, feels the same way. Mr. Wright, sounding proud, says his is "definitely not a typical Florida home." It was built by a stonemason and has the look of a lodge, with a good deal of stonework and a cypress interior and exterior.

"We really didn't even look at any of the engineered product or laminates," Mr. Wright said. "The nature of our house just screams for the real deal."

He felt the pine he saw at Goodwin Heart was so beautiful and unusual that he did not bother to comparison shop.

"If you have something that everybody up and down the block has it can be less expensive," Mr. Wright said. "But I would just as soon have something that everybody up and down the block doesn't have."

That was also a concern for Leonard Woods, of Kroeger Woods Associates Architects in Chappaqua, N.Y., who has a Park Avenue client who wanted an antique pine library. New pine would not do, Mr. Woods said; the widely spaced grain is unattractive. And old pine from demolished 18th- and 19th-century barns might work for a rustic look, but it was wrong for the library.

A Fifth Avenue client of Mr. Woods, faced with a similar problem some years ago, had gone to England and bought an antique room - there is an outfit called Thornhill Galleries there that sells that sort of thing. As Mr. Woods was considering this option for the new client, one of his cabinetmakers, Fred Wildnauer, who operates out of South Berwick, Me., brought him some samples from Timeless Timber. They turned out to match the Fifth Avenue library. Building the finished room is still expensive - Mr. Woods estimates it will be $135,000 to $145,000 - but cheaper than importing an antique room from England.

And were ecological concerns also a consideration?

"No," Mr. Woods said. "It's totally aesthetic. Green? Please. Cute."


sawguy21

WOW.  Must be tough having too much money and running out of places to spend it :D :D There are millions of acres of submerged timber in the hydro reservoirs in British Columbia. It was not logged before flooding. Occasionally one will break loose and shoot out of the water then drop back to lie just under the surface. Makes boating a little treacherous.
old age and treachery will always overcome youth and enthusiasm

jjmk98k

I am sure this is some beautiful wood, but as always it sounds like stuff for the wealthy and not the common man...


good story though, I think the History channel or discovery did a show a year or so back on this "sunken gold"

Jim

Warminster PA, not quite hell, but it is a local phone call. SUPPORT THE TROOPS!

TomFromStLouis

Quote from: jjmk98k on April 22, 2005, 08:48:20 AM
I am sure this is some beautiful wood, but as always it sounds like stuff for the wealthy and not the common man...

Well, since most of us here are common men, I thought this glimpse of how to make a few bucks from the wealthy would be amusing and informative. Trickle down in action. It is laughable that these folks can't find ways to spend it (and feel a need to invent ways), but I wondered if any of us are in on this game. Isn't FDH doing some of this?

jjmk98k

Now if that wood was used to make some nice custom riflestocks or stocks and forends for a nice shotgun... I might not be so crabby about it....


8)
Jim

Warminster PA, not quite hell, but it is a local phone call. SUPPORT THE TROOPS!

Quartlow

Quoteis the sort of fellow who will pay $700 for a sculptured wooden bowl

Thats the customer I'm looking for LOL
Breezewood 24 inch mill
Have a wooderful day!!

Fla._Deadheader

  8);D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D 8)
All truth passes through three stages:
   First, it is ridiculed;
   Second, it is violently opposed; and
   Third, it is accepted as self-evident.

-- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

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