What is recycled timber? It may just be the answer you are looking for if you want a beautiful, yet inexpensive wooden flooring.

Everyone likes to have wooden floors in their homes because not only are they beautiful, they also feel nice and they can also help retain the heat; the only problem is that it costs a lot of money to purchase the wood. But there is a way that you can actually get cheap wood to use as floorboards, and that is to use recycled timber instead of new ones.

What Is It?

Recycled timber, as the name suggests, are wood that are re-used. These pieces of timber are usually taken from old wooden structures like barns, old houses, and some old abandoned warehouses and factories who have been demolished. The salvaged wood are then brought by companies who recycle them by trimming off the edges and pulling out nails, and then re-treating them to prevent rot. Though most people think that the wood from these old building are not that strong anymore, they are actually quite fine for construction purposes; they are actually a lot stronger than new timber because they have been completely dried out, thus preventing the growth of mold.

What Are The Benefits?

There are plenty of benefits of using recycled timber, one is that they are very affordable. Recycled wood only costs a fraction of new pieces of lumber, so you can actually buy more of them if you have a very limited budget.

Another benefit of recycled wood is that they are eco-friendly. No more trees need to get cut down for you to use, you are just re-using the old ones that other people have discarded. If more people were to re-use timber, then the forests will have a chance to recover.

Recycled timber also has a kind of beauty that cannot be found in the newer ones. If the building was erected before controlled logging was implemented, then there is a chance that the wood came from ancient forests, and the wood that came from older trees have a finer grain pattern than what you can see in the wood that was grown exclusively for lumber.

Probably the best benefit that most people are not aware of is that most recycled timber are actually stronger than new lumber. To make new lumber harder and stronger, they are placed in a drying kiln to get rid of the moisture that is still inside the wood, but it cannot completely remove all of it. With recycled wood, you can be sure that the moisture content is practically zero because they have been drying for many years already, thus making them very hard and sturdy.

Disadvantages

There are a couple of disadvantages about using recycled timber, but most of them are minor and can be dealt with easily. For instance, if you want your floors to look pristine, then the nail holes and age knots will most likely turn you off; but if you look at it from another angle, they actually give your floors character by giving it a couple of slight imperfections.

Another slight disadvantage of using recycled timber is that it is hard to get them at the size that you need, especially if you need really long pieces. Keep in mind that these pieces of lumber were salvaged from condemned structures, so they were already cut to size to begin with and they also needed to get trimmed at the edges to remove rot. If you want to make use of affordable lumber, then you should adjust to make them fit.

In Closing…

All in all, even though there are some minor problems in using recycled timber, their benefits actually make up for them; not to mention that you can actually have a solid wooden floor without spending a fortune.

If you ever need recycled timber flooring, or any kind of wooden flooring installed in your home, do not hesitate to visit our website and leaving us a message. We have years of experience in installing wooden floors for our clients all over Sydney, Wollongong, Parramatta, Central Coast, and other towns and cities, and we can guarantee that you will be satisfied with the quality of our work.