Accent Wall

Knots, one-of-a-kind colors, and unique imperfections yield a unique backdrop when used as an accent wall. Standing alone, Douglas Fir makes a powerful impact. We love how this location of True Food Kitchen used our reclaimed Doug fir to add rustic warmth to their sleek open kitchen.

Flooring

Douglas fir flooring has long been a staple in craftsman homes but looks as natural in a modern decorating scheme as it does a rustic one. For a unique look that recalls the past, considering wider planks.

Trusses & Beams

We’re big fans of decorative assets that allude to a functional purpose—and classic trusses and beams achieve just that. In the 19th century, virtually every home used these elements for structural support. While they are no longer contribute to a home’s structural integrity, it does add a unique, historical quality to any home.  We love how this homeowner added dimension to a traditional bathroom with our Douglas fir hand-hewn beams.

If you’re looking for tips about finding the right finish for rough sawn Douglas fir timber beams, get in touch with us; we’d be happy to help. You can also browse our inventory of reclaimed CVG Douglas fir, reclaimed Douglas fir beams, Douglas fir flooring, and more.

While there are many types of wood beams to choose from, reclaimed wood is the best choice both aesthetically and environmentally. Above all, beams are a top-down approach to your home decor, imbuing your space with structural style. So you can put away the furniture catalog and invest in something more lasting and timeless. Here are just some of the reasons we love hand-hewn beams as a design asset.

The Illusion of Space
Whether you live in a spacious home in the country or a loft apartment in the heart of the city, exposed beams lend the illusion of greater space without having to build an addition. How? Beamed ceilings draw the eyes upward, creating the illusion of higher ceilings. For example, a vaulted entryway sets an open and inviting stage for your home.

Convertible Country Style
Have you ever come across a home that had a fairy tale quality to it? It may be the vaulted ceilings. Hand-hewed beams hail back to historic architecture styles that are reminiscent of old world English cottage or French farmhouse style. Aside from providing decorative appeal, the presence of beams instantly communicates high-quality construction.

Nostalgic Elements
As new apartments and suburban housing developments pop up, today many homes look remarkably similar. Yet many people appreciate the charming details of older homes. Even if the rest of your home is modern, beams offer a subtle nod to a time where home construction was of a higher caliber.

Too often, we’re focused on what to add to our homes but a more unique way to elevate your design is to frame your room from the outside in. If you’d like to learn more about AltruWood beams, feel free to contact us.

The World Forestry Center is a non-profit institution situated in the heart of the Portland Zoo. Focusing on educating the public about sustainable forestry, the World Forestry Center plays host to many field trips for classrooms all over Portland.

The institution began in 1905, when the world’s largest log cabin was built for the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition. The massive building was a standout attraction until it burned down in 1964. Portland leaders   used the loss of the cabin as an opportunity to create the Forestry Center, which comes complete with three  timber-minded programs: The Discovery Museum, the World Forest Institute and demonstration tree farms.

The Discovery Museum is family-friendly museum packed with historic information on the timber industry.  Guests receive an interactive learning experience about the natural resources the Pacific Northwest has to offer.

Forest Park is  all over Portland from the south east all the way to the north west quadrants. For being so close to the city, Forest Park still offers natural beauty that feels like it’s from the heart of the wilderness. With plenty of hiking trails fit for robust hikers and horseback riders alike, you can observe the beautiful old growth stands along the banks of the Willamette River. Whether you’re visiting Portland or you’ve lived here for decades, you’re sure to learn plenty from our wood-themed attractions and parks.

With such a strong connection to the timber industry, it’s little wonder AltruWood feels so at home! Get in touch with us today to learn more about our environmentally responsible practices.

Hand-hewn posts and beams can be easily incorporated into pre-existing structures, or serve as a main structural component of an ongoing building project. In either scenario, preserving the beams’ placement as a focal centerpiece is imperative. It should also be noted that hand-hewn posts and beams are very old—some more than one hundred years old!—and as a result, the degree of age and structural soundness will be paramount when deciding how to proceed with their use.

Decorative hand-hewn beams tend to be older and less structurally sound. This makes them ideal candidates for incorporation into a pre-existing home or structure. Because decorative hand-hewn posts and beams are much smaller than structural beams, they are used to add unique character to a home, rather than support the weight of the building. For instance, decorative hand-hewn beams can be featured as a stunning fireplace mantel; while reclaimed beams make a gorgeous ceiling. A contractor or professional builder is a great place to begin designing a ceiling that features decorative beams.

Structural hand-hewn posts and beams often feature a type of wood that’s not being harvested today, which makes it more durable than wood from younger trees. These pieces are ideal candidates for structural work, and are well-suited to support the framework of various construction projects. For example, they can be left with their weathered or painted original exterior, or they can be lightly surfaced with a circular saw or wire brush to display a fresher exterior. The beams can be re-sawn into smaller sizes to create stunning posts and columns, fireplace mantels, and ceiling tresses.

Incorporating hand-hewn posts and beams to your home is a great way to add an exceptional and rustic aesthetic to your living environment. Whether they’re the visual focus of the interior or serving as the foundation of your home, the perfect hand-hewn beams are a simple phone call away. Contact the lumber experts at AltruWood today for more information.

Here’s a look at different types of hand-hewn beams, and which home design applications you should choose for each.

Decorative Hand-Hewn Beams

The first thing you need to remember about hand-hewn beams is that they’re old. Much, much older than anything you can buy at your neighborhood home improvement store. Each of these hand-hewn timbers was cut and shaped using only hand-held tools—more than a hundred years ago. Since then, it has weathered years of cold and heat, storms and sun, and possibly even attacks by insects.

If you’re in the market for hand-hewn beams, you’re probably aware of these–in fact, it’s probably the unique patina those years of use has created that drew you to hand-hewn timbers in the first place. However, because of their many years of use, some hand-hewn beams are no longer strong enough to be a structural, supporting member in new construction.

That doesn’t mean you can’t still embrace the weathered look of these beautiful timbers! Decorative hand-hewn beams can be featured as a stunning fireplace mantel. Ceilings are another great use for reclaimed beams. Decorative beams are much smaller than structural beams and are used to add unique character to your home’s ceiling, rather than support the weight of the building. In fact, smaller beams (or larger beams that have been re-sawn) are actually desirable in this use, so that the massive weight of full-scale timbers doesn’t compromise your building’s roof. A professional lumber company or builder can help you design a ceiling that features decorative beams.

Structural Hand-Hewn Beams

One of the beauties of using reclaimed wood is that the trees cut down more than a century ago often featured old-growth timber of a type that’s not being harvested today. This material is more durable and of higher-quality than wood that comes from younger trees, which means that some of the beams we find when dismantling old buildings are still sturdy enough to have a new life supporting the framework of your construction project.

To use hand-hewn beams for a structural purpose, you will likely need to have them professionally graded. Beams that are free of major checking, splitting, or warping, are most likely to make the grade for use in a new structure.

Structural beams can either be left in their original condition, or they can be re-sawn into smaller sizes. Beams can be left with their weathered or painted original exterior, or they can be lightly surfaced with a circular saw or wire brush to display a fresher exterior. As long as the structural integrity of the beam remains intact, you can use these authentic reclaimed beams to create stunning posts and columns, fireplace mantels, and ceiling tresses.

Adding hand-hewn beams to your home is a sure-fire way to include a unique and rustic aesthetic to your living space. Whether they’re just for looks or holding up your roof, the lumber experts at Altruwood can walk you through the process of selecting the perfect hand-hewn beams.

What is a hand-hewn timber? It’s any long piece of building material that has been transformed from round log to square timber using only hand-held tools. These timbers can then be sawed to different lengths and used as beams, joists, or trusses.

According to a Penn State University study on historic building techniques, in the American colonial period, most buildings were created with timber frames. Giant solid beams called “girts” were connected with mortise-and-tenon joints. Nails were a rare and expensive commodity, so they were held together with wooden pegs.

Water-powered sawmills were a common feature of colonial life long before America declared independence from England. As early as 1620, millers were making a living turning logs into boards, and by 1840, historians estimate that there was a mill for every 245 people in the U.S.

That means the people who used hand-hewing for their building timbers would have been frontier-dwellers who lived far from local sawmills, or people who couldn’t afford mill-sawn beams. These pioneers would have relied on what they had at hand to create building materials: saws, axes, perhaps an adze, and their own strength and skill.

Hand-hewing a log is not for the faint of heart. The first step involves marking out where you plan to make your cuts. Whenever possible, carpenters use a chalk line—a very old building tool that stretches out a straight line coated in chalk over the piece of wood to be marked. The string is then snapped down onto the log, where it leaves behind a chalk mark to guide the cutting.

The worker then “scores” the log—this involves making a series of small cuts along the log, almost to the depth of the chalk line but not quite. This makes it easier to remove large chunks of wood from the outside of the log with a saw or axe—always working close to the desired line, but not quite.

When most of the excess material is gone, it’s time to use an axe for the actual hewing process—cutting straight down the log, blow by blow, to create a square, flat face. Some workers would then use a wood-working tool called an adze to further smooth and shape the surface of the wood. If this hand-hewn timber was for a building where appearance didn’t matter too much—a barn, for instance—the worker might skip this step, which means old recovered beams often still carry the original axe marks.

It’s marks like these—physical evidence of the craftsmen who labored over the timbers—that make hand-hewn beams a highly-desirable commodity even in today’s building market.

In fact, hand-hewing is still practiced today among woodworkers who pride themselves on mastering ancient carpentry techniques. The American College of the Building Arts in South Carolina offers courses on timber framing, and in New England, wood-working artisans are building miniscule hand-hewn timber frame houses reminiscent of the one Thoreau lived in on Walden Pond.

The Timber Framers’ Guild is an international non-profit group dedicated to keeping craftsmanship alive. In 2011, a group of TFG members traveled to Poland, where they reconstructed a Jewish synagogue that had been destroyed in World War II. In order to make the re-construction as authentic as possible, they did all the work by hand, using saws, axes and adzes to hew more than 200 fir logs into construction timbers. It was a massive undertaking, but using traditional hand tools was important to the organizers. According to the project website, “History does not have to be just written, spoken, remembered or interpreted…The story can also be done.”

That sense of history is what makes hand-hewn timbers an inimitable way to bring craftsmanship and a sense of timelessness into your home. Creating hand-hewn timbers requires strength and skill, but it’s the very difficulty of the process that makes hand-hewn timbers such an aesthetic marvel—and the reason why their popularity lives on today.

You can read more for yourself here:

Natural Home and Garden: A Healthier Home

Natural Home and Garden: All Decked Out

Many thanks to Natural Home and Garden Magazine for the shout-out!

Nature dries dead standing timbers. Dead standing trees like oak timber and fir timber are less likely to be warped and twisted compared to living timber when harvested. And although forest fires wreak havoc on living forests and habitats, the fires do not affect the structural integrity of dead standing timbers – the bark is burnt, yes, but the wood remains intact. In the case of dead standing oak, caterpillars eat the tree’s foliage without damaging the trunk.

Harvesting dead standing timbers prevents living trees from being logged, sustaining healthy forests and reducing risk of wildfires (dead wood fuels fire). Harvesting dead standing timbers is a win-win situation for forests and the wood industry.

It’s also a winning situation for wood-wise consumers. With bright, sunny skies and warmer temps on the way, consider giving your outdoor living space a facelift using dead standing timbers.

Here are four dead standing timber ideas for outdoor spaces:

No. 1 – Dead standing timber for outdoor fireplaces

For major wow-factor, add dead standing timber to make a cosmetic mantelshelf or décor frame to your existing outdoor fireplace. Take it up a notch by mixing up wood species – dead oak and dead fir – in your outdoor fireplace feature.

No. 2 – Dead standing timber for outdoor canopy structures

Use dead standing timbers to build an outdoor canopy structure over your existing patio or outdoor living space. The outdoor canopy structure can be freestanding or an extension of your home. Using dead oak and dead fir as the canopy frame will create warmth, depth, and permanence to your outdoor living space, not to mention sun protection when topped with canvas. Added bonus: You can entertain for hours on end without worrying about the pop-up plastic canopy blowing over or weakening after only a season of use.

No. 3 – Dead standing timbers for outdoor pergolas

If you want sun protection but a more organic look, use dead standing timbers to build a freestanding slatted pergola. The criss-crossed beamed roof can be left open for an airy feel, providing minimal weather protection, or can act as a trellis for vines or other climbing plants. Either way, a pergola of dead standing timbers will charm up your outdoor living space.

No. 4 – Dead standing timbers for outdoor furniture

An outdoor living space is an extension of your home and nothing says home like furniture. Use dead standing oak timbers and dead standing fir timbers to build a beautifully functional bench, outdoor coffee table, or old-world patio set. Dead standing timber furniture will accentuate your outdoor living space and last a lifetime.

If you’ll be using dead standing wood timbers for structural purposes like a hearth-bench on the fireplace or a freestanding pergola, be sure to have the timbers professionally graded. Ask the folks at AltruWood for more information.

- Nicole Morales

We’ve also been Facebooking and Tweeting for some time now. Every once in a while we like to highlight the things we’ve been talking about on our social media sites. Especially when we think it’s worth further notice. Let’s take a stroll down memory lane for the month of March to see what’s been on our minds.

Buildings for sale at one measly Euro for residents to turn into a self-styled home. There have got to be similar deals in the U.S. right now. Know of any in your neck of the woods?

Creating a wall from reclaimed wood from Apartment Therapy. And we happen to know where you can get some reclaimed wood!

There’s lots of talk of prefab housing these days, but this advice seems to lend itself to homes both prefab and not.

Tiny spaces have also been all over the place lately, but this may be our favorite recently.

A skyscraper made of wood. It’s seems a retro idea, but what’s old is new again given how steel currently rules most cities.

On Facebook, we put forth this question: To glue down solids on concrete or not? This is something we are asked about frequently.

We were featured in Architect Magazine in March. Heading up a section on reclaimed wood, a pretty picture of one of our hand hewn beams.

Taking a step away from wood for a second…Have you ever seen leather floors? It was one of our crazy flooring pics of the day on Facebook.

For music lovers who also appreciate good design comes the ReAcoustic iPhone and iPad dock. Yes, it’s made from wood!

Here’s an option that may ease your worries: lumber salvaged from dead standing oak.

These are trees that have been killed by gypsy moths: the moths defoliate the trees, killing them, but leaving the trunk intact. It’s good, structurally sound wood, just no longer living and growing and producing CO2. You can have lovely oak floors or beams in your home, while knowing that no new trees were sacrificed specifically to produce them.

Never heard of the gypsy moth? If so, count yourself lucky. These little bugs were first brought to the U.S. in the 1860s by an unlucky scientist named Leopold Trouvelot, who was attempting to cross the moths with silkworms to produce a disease-resistant, silk-spinning super-bug. Unfortunately, gypsy moth larvae escaped from Trouvelot’s Massachusetts home, and the result was a ravenous pest infestation that has become one of the most destructive forces to hit North American hardwoods. It affects mainly forests in the northeastern U.S., with some problem areas in the Midwest and south as well.

The good news for wood-lovers is that gypsy moths only go after the leaves. They feed on the foliage, and leave the rest of the tree alone. However, after several years of successive defoliation, many trees die as a result.

It turns out that these trees, while they may be technically dead, still have a lot of life left in them. Through careful salvage logging, the trees can be felled and milled to create beautiful, usable lumber. According to one study, forests in Illinois contained dead-standing oak trees with trunks up to four feet across.

Few logging companies today would be felling live oak trees of that diameter. To get that kind of material, you’d have to reclaim it from old buildings or other structures that were built prior to today’s logging regulations. With dead standing timber, you can get a look that’s similar to that antique lumber, without as much hassle.

When you’re reclaiming wood from buildings, it takes a great deal of time and effort to process a piece of lumber so that it’s fit to be re-used. Dead standing oak provides the look of that old wood, with one key difference: it’s never been used before. That makes it easier to cut and mill to your specifications. No bolts or nails to watch out for, no additional costs from dismantling a building. In fact, some studies have shown that dead standing timber is actually more stable than timber that’s harvested when it’s green–wood that dries naturally, while it’s still standing, has less shrinking, warping, and cracking than wood that’s cut green and dried later.

One thing to know about dead standing oak is that it’s not entirely pristine. Once a tree dies, other critters tend to move in, so lumber milled from dead standing oak may have worm holes or other markings from its previous life in the forest. For most buyers, that’s okay. After it’s cut, the wood is checked and treated carefully to make sure it’s insect-free and nothing but a few small markings are left. If you’re shopping for antique wood anyway, you’re looking for wood that has a tale to tell; those marks are considered a badge of character, marking each and every board as unique. Wood reclaimed from an old gymnasium may bear dents and dings that tell the tale of a million basketball games played out on its surface; beams from an old barn might show the marks of the hand-held saw form the craftsman who originally cut it. Lumber from dead-standing oak will tell the tale of its life in the forest–and the little creatures that called it home before you did.

So if you’re looking for a way to add the beauty and character of antique oak into your home but you don’t want to cut living trees or deal with the effort and expense of wood reclaimed from buildings, consider dead standing oak. It’s a way to take the devastation caused by a nasty non-native pest, and turn it into something beautiful after all. Call AltruWood to find out about getting dead standing oak for your next project.

- Jennifer Rouse