We were lucky enough to stumble across a timber clearing auction recently and managed to snag a truck load of reclaimed Oregon (or Douglas Fir) beams for very little outlay. Oregon is a wonderful timber for construction. It’s light, easy to work with and has a high bending load capacity. The drawback is that it is very hard to get in long lengths and if you can find it, it’s also very expensive. The folks at Recycled Timber Discounters in Woodend were having a clear out of old stock – lucky for us! They are really nice people too.
So how come we need construction materials when we already have a shed? We built our first shed on a relatively small footprint for a number of reasons. Cost and space were contributing reasons. Every dollar we put into shedding was a dollar we didn’t have to put into the rest of the farm and similarly ever square metre we used up was area that couldn’t be used for production. So we built the smallest shed we could reasonably get away with.
However, there is a broader and more compelling reason – embodied energy. Continue reading “Let’s talk embodied energy”