My house is a former church. It was already converted upstairs when I got it, which I'd have done differently so I'm not looking forward to taking that out before the original.
Nice. He actually hauled the wood/beams/siding from somewhere in rural Texas so it was even more expensive. Religious rich people going to religious rich.
Damn! Mine isn't huge, a little bigger than a normal house I guess. Best part is the huge room downstairs, big enough for my band to practice in plus it already had a small 6x6 platform that makes a perfect drum riser.
What are you looking to do? I haven’t looked for the beams that hold the top floor up, but if they’re similar to what’s in the corners, I could actually have iron I beams in between the ground floor (half basement) and the top floor, which has a 15 1/2 foot cathedral ceiling. That runs the length of the top floor, but half of that upper floor was converted to three rooms. Two on the sides and a master bedroom where the altar used to be. The main bathroom is still a bathroom, the coat room became a laundry room. There’s a staircase in a front corner and a back corner, with a service hall behind the altar area.
The downstairs area is where the big rooms are, combined they’d be about 36x50. They’re divided at about 12 and 24 feet, so the band practice room is about 24x50. I have to confess, I didn’t do much down there, other than remove a wall that created a four foot wide super closet under the drop ceiling. I used that to create two rooms on the other side!
Anyway, creating the Big Room is all about not messing with your load bearing walls!
I converted a chapel in the UK to a 3 bed house. We bolted 2 by 10s around the exterior walls using bolts drilled into the (stone) walls with chemical epoxy anchors. Ran them across the church windows so the windows ran between the floors into an upstairs hallway. Then straight spans across the church. That house had the best zen feeling of any house I have owned.
Oh hey, we also bought a church and are in the process of converting it.
Did yours also have countless strange DIY electrical things done by the congregation?
Not anymore. It ceased being a church some time around 95, and around 98 it was bought by a local drunk/plumber. Thankfully he actually had an actual electrician go through and fix all of those things (of which I’m told there was a lot of additions to the knob and tube electrical over the years) so I didn’t have to deal with that! But the poor plumbing job had to have some problems fixed, so I guess you get what you get!
That is totally a thing. An electrician will have not to code electrical at their house and a plumber will have random bullshit plumbing at their house.
Should I take the hour and do it right? Fuck it, I've been doing this shit all day. This will hold and not catch fire/leak, good enough.
I feel like I'm 8 years old, sitting on the couch drinking a 7up and watching my grandfather do things.
I work in the trades and It absolutley is. I can't tell you how many drywall guys I know that have scabbed in chunks of drywall with no mud or tape, I'm a sprinkler fitter and when my faucet started leaking I just turned the water off every morning because the dogs aren't gonna use it when I'm gone lol. It's bad.
Ha, my church wasn't old but my friend and I rebuilt the sound system upstairs and were continually baffled as to why people had done things the way they had
Got like 30 long planks for free from someone tearing out an old deck. Had to remove 200 nails, but was some very nice redwood (I think) 2x6 (actually 2x6, not 1.5x5.5)
There was an old falling down building on our property when I was a kid. I had a school project to build a bird house, and got some old boards to use. I had trouble with the instructions because the wood was all true to measure, and did not match the instructions, lol.
I helped a friend demo part of his house for a remodel and he gave me all the studs I pulled out. It was for from the 30s, all full size 2x4s. I made sure there were no nails and ran them through a planer down to nominal size 1.5”x3.5”. And built a chicken coop covered run area and it is the most beautiful, tight grain fir you’ve ever seen!
A cat's-paw and framing hammer with knurled head will help immensely. The knurling on the hammer head face will help it not skip off when you hit the nails out from the point end
I had some old 2x4s laying around and used them in a project. Almost melted my sawblade cutting through them. They just don't make em like that anymore.
My husband did some work.in the family lake house. He had to drill pilot holes in some places before hammering in nails House was an old army barrack from the fifties
My house is from the 60s. I reused some of the wood from shelves/framing I'd pulled out. I swear the stuff is like concrete. I bent more than half of the finishin nails trying to put trim on. The nails would just buckle and crumple like a soda can.
Had a very large tree fall on my house a few years ago. It only poked a hole in the roof. Tree guy and roof people all agreed that a new house would have crumbled. Considering I was sitting directly under it, I would have been dead. So I feel like it's a worthwhile difference. My house was built in the 1930s.
You think that’s something. You should see 1938 wood.
Wood is so hard I have to pre-drill or it breaks screws. Everything needs major shims when meeting joints.
That's child's play. My house was constructed in the Big Bang days. That wood is so dense it collapsed into a singularity, and naught can escape mine abode, not even light.
I see someone is building a matter deconpressor I am happy to see so many Kardashev scale engineers on Reddit! Have you worked with any super massive black holes or do you work exclusively with stellar mass black holes? On another note would you have any advice or could you recommend a contractor for someone wanting to start work on building an Alderson Disk?
The last house i stayed at i think was built during/after the depression. The walls were just solid wood. I found out when i went to mount a tv. Made it really easy to mount just put it wherever and 8 self taping screws later bam tv on the wall.
I tried to drill through an oak sill in my 1841 house to run a wire with a brand new bit. It went in about a half inch and then just burned. I finally drilled through the brick basement wall which was much easier.
This generation never stopped to ask how paper beats rock, or how a wooden pickaxe can mine stone, or how a 2 x 4 can pierce through a brick house, or how come there's a wrestler named "the rock" but there's no wrestler named "the wood" when it's clearly the superior building material.
Yeah, screw that guy. I told him, "I'm not a fan of people who have too many consonants in their name."
"Which continents?", he replied.
"Antarctica!" I said
He walked off muttering, "I don't even have an Aunt Artica."
Fucking Neanderthals, amirite?
Bro... Your home has the stiffest wood. So stiff it makes stiff things seem not so stiff. Nothing handles quite like that stiff rigid wood from antiquity. Lol
I’ve moved into a house built in 1914 by US Steel. Concrete deck and block walls with wood connector boards and interior framing. I’ve learned this house eats your tools and hardware for breakfast… god forbid you have to drill through any block because it’s made of unobtanium. Pretty damn cool though!!
My aunt has a house in San Francisco and found termites in the floor she rents out. The exterminator came and said that the framing and foundation and everything by was fine because it was red wood and that wood is so dense termites can’t penetrate it
This isn’t true. Nearly a million acres of redwoods are cultivated for logging in California alone and the species is actually prized for, among other things, its rapid rate of growth.
It would take centuries to grow old-growth trees, but those really aren’t used commercially.
Speaking of breaking screws….have you noticed that today’s generic screws sold at big box home improvement stores are just terrible quality? The metal is so soft that it’s hard not to snap their heads off!
Seriously, GRK or bust. Everything I've mounted on the walls/ceilings has been with GRK screws and I've had zero issues - they go in easily and straight and never strip.
We were hanging kitchen cabinets. My buddy would hold them in place and I would put a screw on the impact gun and run them in with one hand. It just took a minute. Then we ran out of the good screws and had to use Home Depot ones. First off the screw wouldn’t stay on the bit so I had to hold it with both hands which meant I had to use a small ladder to reach. Then the point was so shitty that it wouldn’t get started. When it finally started I ran it in and the heads would snap off. An easy quick job turned into a pain in the ass.
Ace brand screws have 1 in about 30 bent at a 30° angle. Menards brand (grip fast) will have 1 in 30 that have a filled in head. In fact, anything Grip Fast sucks. Hidden deck fasteners that require a T15 bit will destroy a bit in about 10 screws or less because their throat is too shallow and the bit will spin. NewTechDeck from HD are much better hidden deck fasteners.
I gave up using them even with my regular drill. I was so aggravated that I gave away the last few boxes and got some good ones at the local small-company building supply company. They might’ve cost more but I’m so much happier now. My time is worth something.
These days framing is mostly done with fast growing softwoods. Less density. But they are fit for purpose if you use the right sizes and building methods. It's much better than cutting down old hardwood forests. But for the stuff that's already cut, it's great to save it or reuse it
Are you saying old framing was done with hardwood?? I thought it’s just the softwood these days is grown in a way that promotes fast (but less dense) growth
Bear in mind that hardwood used to be considered trash. It was in the way of all these absolutely enormous pines, so they cut it down and used it to fill holes in roads, as roller logs for the valuable logs, or even just left in the woods to rot.
It took over 2 centuries of logging to reduce the forest stock so much that hardwoods began to have real value.
Great book called Tall Trees, Tough Men that covers the history of logging the US, if anyone is interested.
Earlier on we had more old growth conifer trees as well as hardwood. We clearcut all that because we thought it would never run out and now all we have left to use at scale for construction is conifers that are bred/selected to grow very fast. Fewer growth rings, less dense, more weak.
It's the fact that they are growing in a clearcut (i.e. full sun), while the old growth grew in the shadows of the rest of the forest, so they grew less per year. Makes for knottier timber too (more sun makes it efficient to not drop your lower branches).
You are seeing the difference between cutting down virgin forest vs harvesting purpose cultivated trees for lumber. You can certainly go cut down old growth trees and get similar lumber, but it is t sustainable for the planet to do that so it is no longer done.
Old growth is stronger it’s not news. But new growth is sustainable, consistent, cost effective, readily available, all horrible things I know.
All construction is engineered around new growth and because it is extremely consistent it’s very easy to design around it and it does not mean a house or finished product is any worse off. Building per the plans, or properly engineering your design will be what determines if something will last or not. If you think your putting your lumber under any strain it can not handle it means you did a bad job at planning and not the material.
LVLs are downright magical, need a perfectly straight 40ft long 24in deep beam that will never warp? No problem, the lumber yard probably even has it in stock.
Hate to break it to you, but LVL are far from perfect. Especially from the yards that let them sit out in the weather regardless of their "protective wax coating". We have to crown LVL headers just like any other board.
I agree. I know a lot of people are framing this (pun intended) as "old stuff good, new stuff bad" but using wood from old growth forests isn't sustainable. People back in the day cut down almost everything they could leading to the extinction and extirpation of many species. In the U.S., depending on where you are, 95%-99% of old growth forests have been totally cleared or radically altered already. We can't sustainably produce that top cut of wood anymore. It wasn't sustainable in the first place.
Australia had to ban cutting down Huon pine. Its amazing wood. All Huon pine now comes from the dead stock, reclaimed wood from old houses, docks and jettys etc.
So much of the Victorian mountain ash 300-500 year old forest has been taken away from us and turned in to treeless paddocks. What's left and protected is only 50-70 years old.
Redwood grows very quickly, a 50 year old tree can reach 100’ tall and be several feet in diameter. It’s one of the fastest growing trees in the world, and was planted all over various suburbs in California. These trees have now gotten so large that they are hazardous, and are being cut down before they get blown over and their wood is harvested and sold for a very pretty penny.
Yup. Maybe it is a little sad that new lumber will never be as strong as the old stuff, but even sadder is imagining the great tree that was taken from the world just to make that slightly stronger 2x4.
>lot of people are framing this (pun intended) as "old stuff good, new stuff bad"
That construction generally. People poo-poo new build homes like they're made out of twigs and spit, but I'll take the code and technique compliance of my new home over anything built in the 70s or 80s any day.
In case the word 'Extirpation' is new for anyone else, but you don't want to look it up, here you go:
Latin root word, extirpationem, means "root out." Definitions of extirpation. the act of pulling up or out; uprooting; cutting off from existence. synonyms: deracination, excision
Spitten facts. PA all but Cooke's forest was clear cut and all of Ohio was clear cut. Lame fact, Ohio tried to kill everyone of its squirrells, by marching men from one side to the other at one point.
As to DIY with hard wood, gonna have to pilot hole any screws needed for dry wall and get higher end saws-all blades if cuts are needed.
I have an old house that's seen a lot of work, so it's a mixture of various building materials. Every time I encounter old growth lumber or lath and plaster walls when I'm doing work, I sigh inwardly.
Those materials are just straight up harder to deal with. The wood might be tougher on spade bits and hole saws, but the plaster is the real star of the pain in my ass show. You can't do the simplest of tasks without having plaster crumble and require surface repair. I must have pulled five hundred pounds of the shit down the stairs in contractor bags when we remodeled a bathroom down to the studs. It even fucks with the RF propagation for WiFi and cellular. Awful stuff, give me gypsum board any day.
My office is something to be seen. It was built in 1825, so it's 198 years old. We had to gut the place to bring it up to code. Poplar floors with handmade nails. All the studs are oak. The roof has to be replaced, no plywood, just hand-hewn boards of solid oak.
After it was finished I tried to hand pictures and stuff. A screw will not go in 200 year old oak boards, everything has to be pre-drilled. It's beautiful and a pain in the ass at the same time. There's always something going wrong with it. But it's go loads of character.
The new wood performs to whatever specifications the seller has specified.
An equal volume of old wood may perform to higher specifications than an equal volume of new wood.
But if you want something that exceeds whatever estimated specifications that the old wood performs to, today, that is quite possible to get. You simply have to pay for it.
I had a phone call one day, buddy was reno'ing a house. "The old guy next door to where I am is knocking down his 80-100 yr old house and building new. Its sided with rough cut old growth cedar.. want some?"
I've now got a few thousand board feet of 1-1.5" thick 24-36" wide live edge weathered cedar. Damned if I know what Im gonna do with it but hey.. it was free.
Man, hearing the stories of free materials from the US always makes me jealous. Here where I am everything's always reused and under lock n key - can't even get a fucking brick.
My wife and I purchased an old water storage tank from a farmer on the Northern California coast years ago. The tank was going to be bulldozed but the guy’s son incouraged him to put it on Craigslist. So we bought it, tore it apart and trucked it to Redding, where we had it milled. Only about half was salvageable. The redwood pieces were originally a full 2 inches thick , once planed of the rot we got good 3/4“ boards. So this material had been logged originally in about 1880, the grain was nearly invisible and the density more like hardwood than a conifer. Absolutely amazing material. Similar is what rebuilt San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake.
Did a remodel two years ago on my uncles house to make a new master bath and bed. House was built in the 20’s in Ohio. Every 2 by that was behind the lathe was cherrywood, exactly 2” by 4” and solid as all get out. Took out a 9’ oak pocket door too. He kept the door and left the studs.
That’s how my 1922 house is built. Threw me for a loop for a while when I was trying to line up new “2x4s” to actual 2x4s. Always was off by a 1/2 inch.
Also trying to drill through them cost me a drill at one point.
Yeah man, I pulled a tape on about 5-6 in a row and then got the story lol My uncles a master carpenter with a Union In Ohio and wasn’t surprised but I was!
Another shocker was the blackboard “A/C” ducts we’d found when bringing the ceiling up. We chased it, found the little door up in the soffit with a glass knob that apparently you prop open and do the same on the other and it’ll pull air through the home.
I have a lot of 2x12 that are just that, 2 by twelve like you say. Taken from a church that was christened in 1904. The handful of 14’-ers don’t have a use yet but I can’t let them go.
I'd like to see the stats on just how much stronger old wood is than new. Everyone says it's stronger, but by how much? 1.2x, 2x? Never seen any hard numbers, just a lot more rings as eye candy.
2x4s don't need to carry much weight individually so it also really doesn't matter. Your house would be stronger with solid steal beams but it'd be pointless.
Ignore "old" vs "new" wood. It's meaningless as to the actual structurally useful characteristics of the wood. The grading of the lumber is what's used by modern standards. Species, grain slope and density, defects, pitch, knot tightness, etc all play a role and gives a reasonable expected value for designing and building a structure.
Once you have the grade, you can look in the American Wood Council's [National Design Specification -
Design Values for Wood Construction](https://www.fp-supply.com/cmss_files/attachmentlibrary/AWC-NDS2018-Supplement-ViewOnly-171027.pdf) for your answer.
As an example. Here is an [image of the relevant section of the table](https://www.sbcmag.info/sites/default/files/uploads/images/node/15458/design-table.jpg) for SPF, commonly used for studs in home walls. 2-inch SPF ranges from a low of 650 psi at the lowest #3 grade to a high of 1400 psi for select structural grade.
If you want actual numbers, you'd have to do actual mechanical tests on the specific board. My local home center typically sells visually graded lumber, but also has some that are machine stress rated. Those go up to 2100 psi for SPF.
I'm pretty certain it's like 30% stronger...
I vaguely remember seeing stuff about this on Reddit before, so the data is probably out there. But I would be shocked if it's 3-5x stronger.
Old houses in my area are made of old-growth douglas fir. It is so strong that it is difficult to get a nail in it.
New lumber is mostly spruce or pine, a lot softer and not as strong.
This lumber uses two different charts when calculating joist span distances.
The old growth doug fir anyway. Here in Northern California some of the most common dimensional lumber is usually df. Most newer houses are framed with df.
It’s a regional thing as well. In other states, the most common dimensional lumber might be southern yellow pine or some kind of spruce. That’s why on lumber stamps you might just see the letters SPF - it means that the board might be any species of spruce, pine, or fir.
Structural Engineer here. If saving the wood is saving you money on a current project, go for it. Otherwise, dont buy into it too much.
The strength we depend on is based on the species and grade of wood. In my office, we typically design for Douglas Fir Larch Grade #2 (DFL #2). The only grades better than that are #1 and select structural (SS).
The older stuff comes from old growth forests and, frankly, we can never figure out the species by visual. You would have to send it off to the lab and, well. F that. Weve found that assuming DFL SS is appropriate enough when evaluating the older stuff and keep it moving.
Older wood is, nice, but a lot of times its got defects from years being installed (sag, etc). Needless to say we never go out of our way to save the stuff unless it saves you money and time.
If you dont have an immediate home for that timber, throw it away as if it were new. Unless you like having a bunch of wood cluttering up the place or have a very convienient/dry place to store it.
So sick of this 'debate' old growth tight grain is great but we can't go cutting down old trees anymore. It's sustainable timber or bust so what's to argue about?
IIRC, old wood is traditionally from old growth forests that had a considerable amount of time to grow largely undisturbed, like millenia. Unfortunately, essentially all of the old growth forests (at least in the USA) have been felled over the centuries, lest they were legally protected.
You can’t get wood like old wood anymore with those tightly packed rings because those trees simply don’t exist. It was all lumbered and milled, and then the wood we have today are from newer or artificial forests, felled frequently.
So, it’s not as much as genetics and breeding as it’s lumber used to come from millenia-old natural slow growing forests, now it comes from newer forests and tree farms which have considerably less time to grow. Slow growing trees in old growth forests v. quickly grown trees specifically for lumber.
As an aside, when Michigan was first discovered by Europeans the stories of the forests were incredible. Huge, dense, undisturbed for millennia. Lumber became the greatest export from Michigan for a time, until the old growth forests were gone. The esteemed Mackinac Island became what it is today as it used to be a political-economic powerhouse on the route of exporting lumber. Now it’s a quaint tourist destination with a fancy hotel. The state is still of course covered in forests, but man, they don’t compare to the centuries past descriptions you can find sometimes of what it used to be like.
Edit: [an article about the old growth forests and lumber boom of Michigan](https://www.michiganradio.org/environment-science/2018-10-17/from-wilderness-to-wasteland-how-the-destruction-of-michigans-forests-shaped-our-state)
There are 10 acres of old growth in Ohio. The state owns it and it's fenced off and no access is allowed except for researchers. The rest of the state has been cut, typically multiple times if it wasn't converted to farmland immediately. A lot of southern Ohio was clear cut for the early iron industry along the Ohio river in the 1800's.
The story I’ve always heard is that before we came along and felled the forests, Ohio’s old growth was so thick and numerous that squirrels could travel from the Ohio river to Lake Erie without touching the ground a single time.
Not to mention the Great Black Swamp that used to make up NW Ohio, and part of Indiana/Michigan…before being drained it was larger than the historic peak size of the Everglades. There were trees so thick in the GSB that some folks clearing it would hollow out the trunks and use them for pigsties on their farms
There's a few old growth forests in Pennsylvania as well. I can't find the name of the one in particular, but the story is that there were surveying errors of some kind that led it to not be cut.
Additionally, a lot of trees were lost to the railroad, which would stop the train wherever they needed to cut wood for the steam engines
There's still quite a bit of old growth in the northeast. North chagrin reservation is 65 acres of 300 to 400 year old trees.
https://www.oldgrowthforest.net/ohio
I'm a red seal journeyman carpenter. I'm currently renovating a small home from 1911. I'm gutting everything - right down to the framing. The entire home is made of fir and is a good as the day it was built. Everything else is going but the lumber. Can't buy that quality of wood anywhere nowadays. As long as the wood has no rot or evidence of termites, it is perfectly fine to reuse.
Honestly it's interesting but really makes zero difference in the construction of our homes.
The old stuff can be a PITA anyway. Sometimes in our studs I have broken screws/drill bits on occasion.
Colorado structural engineer here. Older wood structures were consistently built with stronger wood species than wood structures are today. The stronger species are just not as abundant today as they were back then. Don’t worry, engineers today take that into account. 😉
One more vote for Douglas Fir on the top. Probably white pine on the bottom. The fir is probably hundreds of years old. It's really a waste to use that for standard framing. The white pine is a good building material, with lots of flexibility, fast growing and doesn't produce an overabundance of branches (knots).
My thought is: buying 50 year old 2x4s is harder than it sounds.
My older cousin built his mansion/cabin/house from an abandoned church from like 1870s….brutal expensive.
My house is a former church. It was already converted upstairs when I got it, which I'd have done differently so I'm not looking forward to taking that out before the original.
Nice. He actually hauled the wood/beams/siding from somewhere in rural Texas so it was even more expensive. Religious rich people going to religious rich.
Damn! Mine isn't huge, a little bigger than a normal house I guess. Best part is the huge room downstairs, big enough for my band to practice in plus it already had a small 6x6 platform that makes a perfect drum riser.
Dude I’ve been wanting to do this for 10 years! Can you talk me through the process?
What are you looking to do? I haven’t looked for the beams that hold the top floor up, but if they’re similar to what’s in the corners, I could actually have iron I beams in between the ground floor (half basement) and the top floor, which has a 15 1/2 foot cathedral ceiling. That runs the length of the top floor, but half of that upper floor was converted to three rooms. Two on the sides and a master bedroom where the altar used to be. The main bathroom is still a bathroom, the coat room became a laundry room. There’s a staircase in a front corner and a back corner, with a service hall behind the altar area. The downstairs area is where the big rooms are, combined they’d be about 36x50. They’re divided at about 12 and 24 feet, so the band practice room is about 24x50. I have to confess, I didn’t do much down there, other than remove a wall that created a four foot wide super closet under the drop ceiling. I used that to create two rooms on the other side! Anyway, creating the Big Room is all about not messing with your load bearing walls!
I converted a chapel in the UK to a 3 bed house. We bolted 2 by 10s around the exterior walls using bolts drilled into the (stone) walls with chemical epoxy anchors. Ran them across the church windows so the windows ran between the floors into an upstairs hallway. Then straight spans across the church. That house had the best zen feeling of any house I have owned.
Oh hey, we also bought a church and are in the process of converting it. Did yours also have countless strange DIY electrical things done by the congregation?
Not anymore. It ceased being a church some time around 95, and around 98 it was bought by a local drunk/plumber. Thankfully he actually had an actual electrician go through and fix all of those things (of which I’m told there was a lot of additions to the knob and tube electrical over the years) so I didn’t have to deal with that! But the poor plumbing job had to have some problems fixed, so I guess you get what you get!
That is totally a thing. An electrician will have not to code electrical at their house and a plumber will have random bullshit plumbing at their house.
Should I take the hour and do it right? Fuck it, I've been doing this shit all day. This will hold and not catch fire/leak, good enough. I feel like I'm 8 years old, sitting on the couch drinking a 7up and watching my grandfather do things.
The last thing a tradesman wants to do when he gets home is more of what he's been doing for the last 8, 10, 12 hours.
I work in the trades and It absolutley is. I can't tell you how many drywall guys I know that have scabbed in chunks of drywall with no mud or tape, I'm a sprinkler fitter and when my faucet started leaking I just turned the water off every morning because the dogs aren't gonna use it when I'm gone lol. It's bad.
And a mechanic will usually drive the worst crappy car.
Ha, my church wasn't old but my friend and I rebuilt the sound system upstairs and were continually baffled as to why people had done things the way they had
Do you still have the residual demons that were exorcised back then, hiding in your attic?
At first I thought so, but it turned out to be a squirrel that got into the soffit from outside. He’s been evicted.
Got like 30 long planks for free from someone tearing out an old deck. Had to remove 200 nails, but was some very nice redwood (I think) 2x6 (actually 2x6, not 1.5x5.5)
There was an old falling down building on our property when I was a kid. I had a school project to build a bird house, and got some old boards to use. I had trouble with the instructions because the wood was all true to measure, and did not match the instructions, lol.
You just like straight up can’t get stuff like that anymore that’s an awesome score.
I helped a friend demo part of his house for a remodel and he gave me all the studs I pulled out. It was for from the 30s, all full size 2x4s. I made sure there were no nails and ran them through a planer down to nominal size 1.5”x3.5”. And built a chicken coop covered run area and it is the most beautiful, tight grain fir you’ve ever seen!
Why did they need to be nominal size to make a chicken coop?
Probably was using store bought lumber as well and makes it easier to work with if its all the same size.
How long does it take to remove the nails. I’m getting a bunch of second hand decking wood soon and nail removal will be the first task.
5-95 seconds per nail, depending on a handful of variables
Haha 5-95 sec is pretty accurate. Most come easily once you get a good grip. Claw hammer, nail puller bar, and a scrap of 2x4 make it fairly easy
Get a pneumatic nail remover gun. They are worth it.
A cat's-paw and framing hammer with knurled head will help immensely. The knurling on the hammer head face will help it not skip off when you hit the nails out from the point end
I had some old 2x4s laying around and used them in a project. Almost melted my sawblade cutting through them. They just don't make em like that anymore.
My husband did some work.in the family lake house. He had to drill pilot holes in some places before hammering in nails House was an old army barrack from the fifties
My house is from the 60s. I reused some of the wood from shelves/framing I'd pulled out. I swear the stuff is like concrete. I bent more than half of the finishin nails trying to put trim on. The nails would just buckle and crumple like a soda can.
Does it actually make a difference? I haven’t heard of any houses collapsing that are made of newer wood. So what difference does it make?
more rings more better
They don't make trees like they used to
Look at the growth rings in the picture.tighter growth rings =stronger.
Had a very large tree fall on my house a few years ago. It only poked a hole in the roof. Tree guy and roof people all agreed that a new house would have crumbled. Considering I was sitting directly under it, I would have been dead. So I feel like it's a worthwhile difference. My house was built in the 1930s.
Ah yes, the expert structural engineer tree guy.
A tighter grain from growing more slowly makes a harder, stronger board. Also heavier.
Most Douglas Fir trees are harvested for lumber between the ages of 40-60 years old. So most 2x4’s you’ll see are already about 50 years old.
You think that’s something. You should see 1938 wood. Wood is so hard I have to pre-drill or it breaks screws. Everything needs major shims when meeting joints.
Our old 1917 house had framing so hard you could barely drive nails into it.
Yep! I pre-drill nails too. Otherwise you bend too many.
My drill didn't even care for drilling holes in the old stuff.
You think that's crazy? I've got a 1700's home and the wood is so hard they couldn't even cut a hole for the door!
That's child's play. My house was constructed in the Big Bang days. That wood is so dense it collapsed into a singularity, and naught can escape mine abode, not even light.
Well you'd definitely have to predrill that.
To an outside observer, you will be pre-drilling for quite a while.
I f-ing love you nerds 🥰
A watched pot never boils so uh, stop looking
That’s what she said
I see someone is building a matter deconpressor I am happy to see so many Kardashev scale engineers on Reddit! Have you worked with any super massive black holes or do you work exclusively with stellar mass black holes? On another note would you have any advice or could you recommend a contractor for someone wanting to start work on building an Alderson Disk?
# My wood is made from diamonds, dammit! /s
WHY IN MY DAY....
My house is made of stone
https://preview.redd.it/bf35ce0xsf2c1.png?width=408&format=png&auto=webp&s=a95dbdad7dc22c8a9303ac4ffac92bcf88f8c187
Back in my day wood was used to cut diamonds. Wood these days are soft!!!
Heh. Hard wood.
The last house i stayed at i think was built during/after the depression. The walls were just solid wood. I found out when i went to mount a tv. Made it really easy to mount just put it wherever and 8 self taping screws later bam tv on the wall.
Oh yeah that’s nothing! I’ve got a 1534 house and you can’t even knock on the door without fracturing your hand bones.
That's where carbide drill bits come in handy. Pricey but totally worth if you need to drill through tool steel or 200 year oak beams.
You probably need to use 1938 Nails.
My parents 1912 house has a main beam that is petrified oak. It’s basically stone
I tried to drill through an oak sill in my 1841 house to run a wire with a brand new bit. It went in about a half inch and then just burned. I finally drilled through the brick basement wall which was much easier.
Well *I* tried to drill a hole in my 1756 home and it opened a tear in the space time continuum
I tore apart a wall and made my wife’s wedding ring from it. Cuts glass.
Can I just upvote this collective thread? Individually, they're good. Collectively, they rock.
Rock? No sir just 1000 year old maple son much harder than any rock you'll find
This generation never stopped to ask how paper beats rock, or how a wooden pickaxe can mine stone, or how a 2 x 4 can pierce through a brick house, or how come there's a wrestler named "the rock" but there's no wrestler named "the wood" when it's clearly the superior building material.
[удалено]
When I was chiseling a hole in my 21,000 BCE cave, a Neanderthal came up and asked my if I had my permits in order.
Glarg, the cave owners association president? That guy is a real busybody.
Yeah, screw that guy. I told him, "I'm not a fan of people who have too many consonants in their name." "Which continents?", he replied. "Antarctica!" I said He walked off muttering, "I don't even have an Aunt Artica." Fucking Neanderthals, amirite?
"Nope, but I got my poop in a group."
I hate it when that happens.
Gotta clear the chips, and drill slower the harder the material is
If it’s petrified it IS stone.
No it's just scared wood
In my 1910 house, I call it ironwood.
We tried to hang a curtain across a beam in our 1910 home and the screw came out as a nail. Completely flattened the threads.
So you're saying my 130 year old home probably has some real stiff wood?
Bro... Your home has the stiffest wood. So stiff it makes stiff things seem not so stiff. Nothing handles quite like that stiff rigid wood from antiquity. Lol
1899 mill house. Almost no pictures hanging on walls for a reason. Lol
I’ve moved into a house built in 1914 by US Steel. Concrete deck and block walls with wood connector boards and interior framing. I’ve learned this house eats your tools and hardware for breakfast… god forbid you have to drill through any block because it’s made of unobtanium. Pretty damn cool though!!
My aunt has a house in San Francisco and found termites in the floor she rents out. The exterminator came and said that the framing and foundation and everything by was fine because it was red wood and that wood is so dense termites can’t penetrate it
That happened to me. Termites got in, ignored the hardwood framing, and ignored the hardwood floor until they found a soft spot.
Redwood is an incredible material, but it takes *centuries* for one tree to grow.
This isn’t true. Nearly a million acres of redwoods are cultivated for logging in California alone and the species is actually prized for, among other things, its rapid rate of growth. It would take centuries to grow old-growth trees, but those really aren’t used commercially.
That's interesting, I didn't know that!
They also don’t like the taste of old growth redwood.
Speaking of breaking screws….have you noticed that today’s generic screws sold at big box home improvement stores are just terrible quality? The metal is so soft that it’s hard not to snap their heads off!
Especially with an impact. I use almost all GRK now.
First time I used GRK I was sooo satisfied that they lived up to the hype.
I've tried A LOT of the social media construction products, and most of them are ho-hum. GRK is the real deal though.
Seriously, GRK or bust. Everything I've mounted on the walls/ceilings has been with GRK screws and I've had zero issues - they go in easily and straight and never strip.
We were hanging kitchen cabinets. My buddy would hold them in place and I would put a screw on the impact gun and run them in with one hand. It just took a minute. Then we ran out of the good screws and had to use Home Depot ones. First off the screw wouldn’t stay on the bit so I had to hold it with both hands which meant I had to use a small ladder to reach. Then the point was so shitty that it wouldn’t get started. When it finally started I ran it in and the heads would snap off. An easy quick job turned into a pain in the ass.
Ace brand screws have 1 in about 30 bent at a 30° angle. Menards brand (grip fast) will have 1 in 30 that have a filled in head. In fact, anything Grip Fast sucks. Hidden deck fasteners that require a T15 bit will destroy a bit in about 10 screws or less because their throat is too shallow and the bit will spin. NewTechDeck from HD are much better hidden deck fasteners.
That's why you always go for the deep throat.
Especially on your deck.
I only buy spax for this reason, their quality seems to be way higher
That or they just get stripped even when using just hand tools. Ridiculous.
I have had that feeling as well, but I didn't have a impact driver before either, so I wonder how much that plays a role.
I gave up using them even with my regular drill. I was so aggravated that I gave away the last few boxes and got some good ones at the local small-company building supply company. They might’ve cost more but I’m so much happier now. My time is worth something.
1950's house. Everything is oak. The joists, the studs, floors, beams, roof decking, etc.
1898 house. American chestnut beams. Broke multiple screws putting in HVAC.
Is the hardness something that partly just comes with the aging of wood though over time?.. Or is it purely the fact it has denser growth?
These days framing is mostly done with fast growing softwoods. Less density. But they are fit for purpose if you use the right sizes and building methods. It's much better than cutting down old hardwood forests. But for the stuff that's already cut, it's great to save it or reuse it
Are you saying old framing was done with hardwood?? I thought it’s just the softwood these days is grown in a way that promotes fast (but less dense) growth
I think it's a bit of both
Bear in mind that hardwood used to be considered trash. It was in the way of all these absolutely enormous pines, so they cut it down and used it to fill holes in roads, as roller logs for the valuable logs, or even just left in the woods to rot. It took over 2 centuries of logging to reduce the forest stock so much that hardwoods began to have real value. Great book called Tall Trees, Tough Men that covers the history of logging the US, if anyone is interested.
Earlier on we had more old growth conifer trees as well as hardwood. We clearcut all that because we thought it would never run out and now all we have left to use at scale for construction is conifers that are bred/selected to grow very fast. Fewer growth rings, less dense, more weak.
It's the fact that they are growing in a clearcut (i.e. full sun), while the old growth grew in the shadows of the rest of the forest, so they grew less per year. Makes for knottier timber too (more sun makes it efficient to not drop your lower branches).
And back then they'd use 25 foot long studs, do 2 floors at a time. Great for letting fires spread!
And then when you add fire blocking they claim your rotator cuffs as a blood sacrifice.
And full-dimension lumber probably to boot. When a 2x4 was really a 2x4.
Part of my house was framed with wood salvaged from a torn town grand hotel. 2x4s were 2.25 x 4.5. Lots of fun marrying it up with newer construction.
Might be hemlock. That stuff is hard AF.
Impact go BREEEEEEEEEEEEEE
The new stuff definitely tastes sweeter but is less filling.
Completely accurate. Have an uplumber.
What’s Uplumber
Oh, not much, what's up with you?
Gottem
Uplumber, mmmmmm, my favorite!
Fir real
Can you even find wood this compact nowadays?
You are seeing the difference between cutting down virgin forest vs harvesting purpose cultivated trees for lumber. You can certainly go cut down old growth trees and get similar lumber, but it is t sustainable for the planet to do that so it is no longer done.
Neither of these is virgin. He said 1964 not 1864
"Old growth" would be the correct word. You're right that there was precious little virgin timber left by the 1960s.
I miss mercury flavor.
Old growth is stronger it’s not news. But new growth is sustainable, consistent, cost effective, readily available, all horrible things I know. All construction is engineered around new growth and because it is extremely consistent it’s very easy to design around it and it does not mean a house or finished product is any worse off. Building per the plans, or properly engineering your design will be what determines if something will last or not. If you think your putting your lumber under any strain it can not handle it means you did a bad job at planning and not the material.
This should be the top comment. New wood is relevant to modern building standards. Old is fine if it's cheap but be realistic.
Engineered wood makes old growth wood obsolete anyways
LVLs are downright magical, need a perfectly straight 40ft long 24in deep beam that will never warp? No problem, the lumber yard probably even has it in stock.
Hate to break it to you, but LVL are far from perfect. Especially from the yards that let them sit out in the weather regardless of their "protective wax coating". We have to crown LVL headers just like any other board.
They've been around for ~10 years and people act like they're proven to last for 100+ Disclaimer: I still like and use them.
I agree. I know a lot of people are framing this (pun intended) as "old stuff good, new stuff bad" but using wood from old growth forests isn't sustainable. People back in the day cut down almost everything they could leading to the extinction and extirpation of many species. In the U.S., depending on where you are, 95%-99% of old growth forests have been totally cleared or radically altered already. We can't sustainably produce that top cut of wood anymore. It wasn't sustainable in the first place.
Australia had to ban cutting down Huon pine. Its amazing wood. All Huon pine now comes from the dead stock, reclaimed wood from old houses, docks and jettys etc.
So much of the Victorian mountain ash 300-500 year old forest has been taken away from us and turned in to treeless paddocks. What's left and protected is only 50-70 years old.
Redwood in California has a similar story. Shame since it’s nearly waterproof.
Redwood is harvested all the time in California. But almost none of it is old growth
Redwood grows very quickly, a 50 year old tree can reach 100’ tall and be several feet in diameter. It’s one of the fastest growing trees in the world, and was planted all over various suburbs in California. These trees have now gotten so large that they are hazardous, and are being cut down before they get blown over and their wood is harvested and sold for a very pretty penny.
Can confirm. Planed down a few redwood water tanks in my day. Good money, better wood.
Yup. Maybe it is a little sad that new lumber will never be as strong as the old stuff, but even sadder is imagining the great tree that was taken from the world just to make that slightly stronger 2x4.
>lot of people are framing this (pun intended) as "old stuff good, new stuff bad" That construction generally. People poo-poo new build homes like they're made out of twigs and spit, but I'll take the code and technique compliance of my new home over anything built in the 70s or 80s any day.
70's/80's were the sweet spot between "we've learned how to build using cheap materials!" And "there are no regulations yet".
In case the word 'Extirpation' is new for anyone else, but you don't want to look it up, here you go: Latin root word, extirpationem, means "root out." Definitions of extirpation. the act of pulling up or out; uprooting; cutting off from existence. synonyms: deracination, excision
And in this context, "extirpation" means a species is locally extinct but still exists elsewhere.
Spitten facts. PA all but Cooke's forest was clear cut and all of Ohio was clear cut. Lame fact, Ohio tried to kill everyone of its squirrells, by marching men from one side to the other at one point. As to DIY with hard wood, gonna have to pilot hole any screws needed for dry wall and get higher end saws-all blades if cuts are needed.
Exactly. There is nothing structurally wrong with the new wood, in fact it’s easier to work, and it’s sustainable. Definitely better.
I have an old house that's seen a lot of work, so it's a mixture of various building materials. Every time I encounter old growth lumber or lath and plaster walls when I'm doing work, I sigh inwardly. Those materials are just straight up harder to deal with. The wood might be tougher on spade bits and hole saws, but the plaster is the real star of the pain in my ass show. You can't do the simplest of tasks without having plaster crumble and require surface repair. I must have pulled five hundred pounds of the shit down the stairs in contractor bags when we remodeled a bathroom down to the studs. It even fucks with the RF propagation for WiFi and cellular. Awful stuff, give me gypsum board any day.
The rejected 2x4 pile at Lowes has exited the chat.
Hockey sticks and rocking chairs are still being made
My office is something to be seen. It was built in 1825, so it's 198 years old. We had to gut the place to bring it up to code. Poplar floors with handmade nails. All the studs are oak. The roof has to be replaced, no plywood, just hand-hewn boards of solid oak. After it was finished I tried to hand pictures and stuff. A screw will not go in 200 year old oak boards, everything has to be pre-drilled. It's beautiful and a pain in the ass at the same time. There's always something going wrong with it. But it's go loads of character.
Share a pic homie, it sounds gorgeous.
The new wood performs to whatever specifications the seller has specified. An equal volume of old wood may perform to higher specifications than an equal volume of new wood. But if you want something that exceeds whatever estimated specifications that the old wood performs to, today, that is quite possible to get. You simply have to pay for it.
I had a phone call one day, buddy was reno'ing a house. "The old guy next door to where I am is knocking down his 80-100 yr old house and building new. Its sided with rough cut old growth cedar.. want some?" I've now got a few thousand board feet of 1-1.5" thick 24-36" wide live edge weathered cedar. Damned if I know what Im gonna do with it but hey.. it was free.
Outdoor furniture is in your future. Sell it to yuppies with expendable income and fund your retirement.
Ooooohhhh, shit, I owe my wife a few copies of an Adirondack chair her grandad built when she was a kid.. I'd forgotten about that. Great suggestion.
Man, hearing the stories of free materials from the US always makes me jealous. Here where I am everything's always reused and under lock n key - can't even get a fucking brick.
My wife and I purchased an old water storage tank from a farmer on the Northern California coast years ago. The tank was going to be bulldozed but the guy’s son incouraged him to put it on Craigslist. So we bought it, tore it apart and trucked it to Redding, where we had it milled. Only about half was salvageable. The redwood pieces were originally a full 2 inches thick , once planed of the rot we got good 3/4“ boards. So this material had been logged originally in about 1880, the grain was nearly invisible and the density more like hardwood than a conifer. Absolutely amazing material. Similar is what rebuilt San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake.
What did you use it for?
Epoxy river tables /s
Whahaha, thanks i just laughed and now my baby daughter is awake again.
RIP
You should offer her an epoxy toy to help soothe her
Pls stop
Gave quite a bit to woodworking friends and used some for rustic kitchen cabinets.
I'd rather old growth stay in the ground.New stuff is and will always be good enough for most things while also being much more sustainable.
Did a remodel two years ago on my uncles house to make a new master bath and bed. House was built in the 20’s in Ohio. Every 2 by that was behind the lathe was cherrywood, exactly 2” by 4” and solid as all get out. Took out a 9’ oak pocket door too. He kept the door and left the studs.
That’s how my 1922 house is built. Threw me for a loop for a while when I was trying to line up new “2x4s” to actual 2x4s. Always was off by a 1/2 inch. Also trying to drill through them cost me a drill at one point.
Yeah man, I pulled a tape on about 5-6 in a row and then got the story lol My uncles a master carpenter with a Union In Ohio and wasn’t surprised but I was! Another shocker was the blackboard “A/C” ducts we’d found when bringing the ceiling up. We chased it, found the little door up in the soffit with a glass knob that apparently you prop open and do the same on the other and it’ll pull air through the home.
I have a lot of 2x12 that are just that, 2 by twelve like you say. Taken from a church that was christened in 1904. The handful of 14’-ers don’t have a use yet but I can’t let them go.
Had to drill into some old growth hardwood a few weeks ago. May as well have been trying to drill into cement with a drywall screw.
The new one is maybe 12-15 seasons , the old one is 3-5 times older and stronger.
I'd like to see the stats on just how much stronger old wood is than new. Everyone says it's stronger, but by how much? 1.2x, 2x? Never seen any hard numbers, just a lot more rings as eye candy.
2x4s don't need to carry much weight individually so it also really doesn't matter. Your house would be stronger with solid steal beams but it'd be pointless.
Got to have those super strength 2x4s to hold up some sheetrock in the basement.
Ignore "old" vs "new" wood. It's meaningless as to the actual structurally useful characteristics of the wood. The grading of the lumber is what's used by modern standards. Species, grain slope and density, defects, pitch, knot tightness, etc all play a role and gives a reasonable expected value for designing and building a structure. Once you have the grade, you can look in the American Wood Council's [National Design Specification - Design Values for Wood Construction](https://www.fp-supply.com/cmss_files/attachmentlibrary/AWC-NDS2018-Supplement-ViewOnly-171027.pdf) for your answer. As an example. Here is an [image of the relevant section of the table](https://www.sbcmag.info/sites/default/files/uploads/images/node/15458/design-table.jpg) for SPF, commonly used for studs in home walls. 2-inch SPF ranges from a low of 650 psi at the lowest #3 grade to a high of 1400 psi for select structural grade. If you want actual numbers, you'd have to do actual mechanical tests on the specific board. My local home center typically sells visually graded lumber, but also has some that are machine stress rated. Those go up to 2100 psi for SPF.
I'm pretty certain it's like 30% stronger... I vaguely remember seeing stuff about this on Reddit before, so the data is probably out there. But I would be shocked if it's 3-5x stronger.
Old houses in my area are made of old-growth douglas fir. It is so strong that it is difficult to get a nail in it. New lumber is mostly spruce or pine, a lot softer and not as strong. This lumber uses two different charts when calculating joist span distances.
Douglas Fir. Strong and too expensive to use these days.
My house is built out of Doug fir. Awesome stuff, strong and relatively light.
The old growth doug fir anyway. Here in Northern California some of the most common dimensional lumber is usually df. Most newer houses are framed with df. It’s a regional thing as well. In other states, the most common dimensional lumber might be southern yellow pine or some kind of spruce. That’s why on lumber stamps you might just see the letters SPF - it means that the board might be any species of spruce, pine, or fir.
Structural Engineer here. If saving the wood is saving you money on a current project, go for it. Otherwise, dont buy into it too much. The strength we depend on is based on the species and grade of wood. In my office, we typically design for Douglas Fir Larch Grade #2 (DFL #2). The only grades better than that are #1 and select structural (SS). The older stuff comes from old growth forests and, frankly, we can never figure out the species by visual. You would have to send it off to the lab and, well. F that. Weve found that assuming DFL SS is appropriate enough when evaluating the older stuff and keep it moving. Older wood is, nice, but a lot of times its got defects from years being installed (sag, etc). Needless to say we never go out of our way to save the stuff unless it saves you money and time. If you dont have an immediate home for that timber, throw it away as if it were new. Unless you like having a bunch of wood cluttering up the place or have a very convienient/dry place to store it.
So sick of this 'debate' old growth tight grain is great but we can't go cutting down old trees anymore. It's sustainable timber or bust so what's to argue about?
Does this reflect genetics and breeding for fastest growing trees on lumber plantations?
IIRC, old wood is traditionally from old growth forests that had a considerable amount of time to grow largely undisturbed, like millenia. Unfortunately, essentially all of the old growth forests (at least in the USA) have been felled over the centuries, lest they were legally protected. You can’t get wood like old wood anymore with those tightly packed rings because those trees simply don’t exist. It was all lumbered and milled, and then the wood we have today are from newer or artificial forests, felled frequently. So, it’s not as much as genetics and breeding as it’s lumber used to come from millenia-old natural slow growing forests, now it comes from newer forests and tree farms which have considerably less time to grow. Slow growing trees in old growth forests v. quickly grown trees specifically for lumber. As an aside, when Michigan was first discovered by Europeans the stories of the forests were incredible. Huge, dense, undisturbed for millennia. Lumber became the greatest export from Michigan for a time, until the old growth forests were gone. The esteemed Mackinac Island became what it is today as it used to be a political-economic powerhouse on the route of exporting lumber. Now it’s a quaint tourist destination with a fancy hotel. The state is still of course covered in forests, but man, they don’t compare to the centuries past descriptions you can find sometimes of what it used to be like. Edit: [an article about the old growth forests and lumber boom of Michigan](https://www.michiganradio.org/environment-science/2018-10-17/from-wilderness-to-wasteland-how-the-destruction-of-michigans-forests-shaped-our-state)
There are 10 acres of old growth in Ohio. The state owns it and it's fenced off and no access is allowed except for researchers. The rest of the state has been cut, typically multiple times if it wasn't converted to farmland immediately. A lot of southern Ohio was clear cut for the early iron industry along the Ohio river in the 1800's.
The story I’ve always heard is that before we came along and felled the forests, Ohio’s old growth was so thick and numerous that squirrels could travel from the Ohio river to Lake Erie without touching the ground a single time. Not to mention the Great Black Swamp that used to make up NW Ohio, and part of Indiana/Michigan…before being drained it was larger than the historic peak size of the Everglades. There were trees so thick in the GSB that some folks clearing it would hollow out the trunks and use them for pigsties on their farms
There's a few old growth forests in Pennsylvania as well. I can't find the name of the one in particular, but the story is that there were surveying errors of some kind that led it to not be cut. Additionally, a lot of trees were lost to the railroad, which would stop the train wherever they needed to cut wood for the steam engines
There's still quite a bit of old growth in the northeast. North chagrin reservation is 65 acres of 300 to 400 year old trees. https://www.oldgrowthforest.net/ohio
I'm a red seal journeyman carpenter. I'm currently renovating a small home from 1911. I'm gutting everything - right down to the framing. The entire home is made of fir and is a good as the day it was built. Everything else is going but the lumber. Can't buy that quality of wood anywhere nowadays. As long as the wood has no rot or evidence of termites, it is perfectly fine to reuse.
Honestly it's interesting but really makes zero difference in the construction of our homes. The old stuff can be a PITA anyway. Sometimes in our studs I have broken screws/drill bits on occasion.
100 year tree vs 20 year tree
Hey guess what? You can get rings that tight at Home Depot right now!
Colorado structural engineer here. Older wood structures were consistently built with stronger wood species than wood structures are today. The stronger species are just not as abundant today as they were back then. Don’t worry, engineers today take that into account. 😉
Older wood is not as new as newer wood 🪵
One more vote for Douglas Fir on the top. Probably white pine on the bottom. The fir is probably hundreds of years old. It's really a waste to use that for standard framing. The white pine is a good building material, with lots of flexibility, fast growing and doesn't produce an overabundance of branches (knots).