Old Wood Finds New Life

Building with reclaimed timber is increasingly popular

by Jim Sloan, from the Reno Gazette-Journal, May 26th, 2002

You walk into Lynne Edminster's new place in Olympic Valley, and there's a lot to notice. There's the round dining room with the soaring, turreted ceiling. There's the two-story fireplace built from native granite, textured with living lichen. There's the spiral staircase that pulls you up through three stories of Old Tahoe elegance.

But one lasting impression is this: For a new house, this place has an old feel to it. Not old as in shabby or lived in. Old as in historic, like the place was built centuries ago with beams hand carved from ancient trees.

That's because much of the home was designed using reclaimed wood. The stairs are made of salvaged Brazilian hardwoods. The ceilings are tongue-and-groove Douglas fir. And all the modern steel and glue-lam beams throughout the house are wrapped in 300-year-old fir, the corners carefully mitered, puttied and plugged to resemble the kind of timbers you rarely ever see in modern construction.

But most of the striking wood in the 3,700-square-foot home is in the floors. The wood - a mixture of rosewood, narra and padauk with some other species possibly thrown in - has been resurrected from old railroad ties being jerked out of the soggy ground in Thailand a part of a government program to replace the country's rail lines.

The ties were logged and sawn on site starting 100 years ago as the railroad was pushed through the jungles of Southeast Asia. Most of that rainforest is gone now, but the wood - some of it too rare to be harvested commercially - survives.

" We heard from some friends traveling in Thailand about these mountains of old railroad ties," said Don Banducci, one of the founders of AsiaRain, the company that sells the floors. "We were on a plane in three days. We found people hauling it away to use for firewood and retaining walls. But when we milled some of it, we couldn't believe how beautiful the wood inside was."

Neither could Edminster. As an interior designer, she has looked at a lot of flooring samples. But she'd never seen anything like AsiaRain. "It took my breath away," she said. "It almost has a sense of history about it."

Wood Samaritans

Using old wood in new houses has become increasingly popular in recent years - particularly in the high-end homes being built in the Lake Tahoe region. Most salvaged timber on the market today was originally sawn from old-growth trees that were much larger and had tighter growth rings - and a denser, finer grain - than trees of the same species today.

A lot of the wood comes from old homes, warehouses, churches and barns that have to be torn down for safety reasons, and some of it comes from other historic structures. One company, Trestlewood in Utah, peddles wood from the 12-mile-long Lucin Cutoff Trestle that once carried Southern Pacific trains over the Great Salt Lake. Trestlewood will also sell you southern yellow pine flooring salvaged from the Spiegel warehouse in Chicago or redwood planks from old California pickle vats.

Builders like the old wood because after 40 to 120 years bolted in place, it is dry and seasoned and rarely warps. Designers like the old wood for the powerful sense of history and strength it conveys.

Recycled wood has its flaws. There are a lot of knots, nail holes, discoloration from old hardware or hinges, even wormholes. Nut that's OK. In face, that's good. In some cases, the more "character marks" the wood has, the better. It adds to the historic record of the floor.

" Select and clear is out," said Ed Butler, owner pf Butler Flooring in Incline Village and a dealer who specializes in floors with stories to tell. "People want floors with character. They want big knots. They want to see the black streaks from old bolts in the wood. In a lot of the homes we do, the floors are a conversation piece."

Butler has put in floors made from reclaimed oak, pine and chestnut. He recently put a floor made of hand-scraped hickory into a home in Northstar. At one point, the customer was worried the floor didn't look, well, bad enough. "She wanted more knots, bigger knots. You never used to hear that," Butler said.

" There is a lot of charm in that old wood," said George Pasvantis, Edminster's contractor. "The redwood you get today doesn't even compare to the old-growth timbers. It's just not the same wood."

Honoring Old Trees

Here's another advantage to using salvaged wood" It makes you feel like you're doing your part to save the Earth. You can have old-growth redwood in your house without living with the guilt that you contributed to the destruction of a 400-year-old giant. In face, you can feel like you're honoring the memory of those old trees by putting them back to work for future generations.

"Turning these old woods into flooring extends the wood's useful life another 100 years," Banducci said of rare hardwoods found in his old railroad ties. "And it reduces the pressure to cut down more rainforests. It's like, we've got to get more people to buy these floors so we can go to Thailand and rescue some more wood."

AsiaRain founders Richard McFarland, 44, and his wife Erika Carpenter, 34, got into the antique wood business about 10 years ago when Richard moved to McCloud, CA, an old lumber town, and started using reclaimed wood in a house he was building. When buildings in the area were torn down, the couple would offer to cart away the old wood for nothing. Then they'd mill it and sell it. One of their customers was Banducci, 53, who'd just made a fortune after selling his Yakima bike rack company and was building a place on the North Coast using recycled wood. Banducci eventually became their partner. In just a few years, competition for reclaimed Douglas fir and redwood in northern California became pretty intense and the partners began looking elsewhere for wood. They were thinking about Asia or Russia when word got to them about all those railroad ties.

Getting started wasn't easy. The group had to set up a Thai corporation, which meant wining and dining generals and mill owners, getting new customs regulations established and sorting through thousands of ties to make sure they got the best ones. In June 2001, the company took its first shipment of flooring and began peddling their product to contractors, designers and architects. "Everyone who sees it just goes nuts," said Butler. "The wood is beautiful, dense and durable. The milling is perfect."

Although AsiaRain has only gon into a handful of homes in the Truckee-North Tahoe area, Banducci and his partners think the region is going to be a '"hotbed" for their product. There are a lot of people building second homes and many of them are looking for distinctive styles.

Although the wood itself isn't overly expensive - Edminster's floors cost about $8.50 a square foot - the extreme density of the wood requires special care while installing.

" We had to keep our saw blades pretty sharp," Pasvantis said. "This wood is hard!"

Although the AsiaRain floors are not preserved or stained, they do have to be sanded and sealed with a water-based polyurethane after they've been installed. The final product is a floor that should last a long, long time.

" I asked George (Pasvantis, the contractor) if my dining room table would dent the hardwood floors," Edminster said. "He just laughed. He said, 'Nothing is going to dent that wood.'"

AsiaRain Hardwood is now in production.

AsiaRain hardwoods are more expensive than some hardwood floors but cheaper than other higher-end products. Prices for AsiaRain run from $6.50 per square foot (for large orders) to $8.95/sf for smaller orders under 1000 square feet. The price of installation depends on who does the job, but the company says you should expect to pay from $4 to $6 per square foot.

AsiaRain is not in any dealer showrooms in this area, but you can order directly from them by calling 800-220-9062.

The woods are sorted by color - gold, blond, rise and cinnamon - rather than by species. That's because in many cases, the company isn't sure what the species is. The company's "classic jungle mix" includes a wide range of hues and grains and "isn't for the faint of heart," company co-founder Don Banducci said. About 30 percent of each order of standard flooring will contain some "character grade" pieces - boards with evidence of previous use, such as iron-oxide stains and spike holes, which can be filled with hardwood plugs or resin. You can request "select grade" - which will include fewer character grade boards - but the cost will be about 20 percent higher.

" Most people like the character grade wood mixed in," said AsiaRain co-founder Richard McFarland. "It gives the floor a warmth." Unlike most railroad ties, these woods have not been preserved or treated with any chemicals. And the strong colors are all natural, none of the floors have been stained or colored in any way.

The railroad ties are milled and planed into flooring in Thailand. Pieces are 5/8 inches thick and come in random widths and lengths. The finished flooring is shipped to the Bay Area and then trucked to a warehouse in McCloud in northern California. The company has purchased 50,000 to 60,000 ties and has about 190,000 board feet of wood in storage and about twice that amount in production and on its way to the United States.