This weekend we ventured north to Duluth, MN to visit the Duluth Timber Company. Our kitchen design calls for a 15 foot breakfast bar that we had originally planned to construct out of Birch plywood. Our cabinet maker Matt Eastvold from Eastvold Custom Woodworks had suggested that a really cool, very “green” friendly option would be to utilize a reclaimed wood timber. Matt had lived in Duluth a few years back and had become familiar with the Duluth Timber Company and worked with their products to create stunning reclaimed timber table that graced the pages of Dwell magazine. My interest was peaked enough that we made plans to take a tour of the facilities and learn more about the use of reclaimed wood.

Located on a dirt road on a man made peninsula on Lake Superior, The Duluth Timber company sits in the shadows of a Georgia Pacific paper plant and an old General Mills building. The 900 foot long corrugated steel building, is surrounded by the architectural remnants from timber framed buildings from around the country and beyond.

We had arranged to meet with the Duluth Timber Company’s Peter Krieger. A former Twin Cities native and timber frame industry expert, who had been lured North to work with the nationals greatest collection of reclaimed timbers. We met at the gates of the facilities early on Saturday morning and made our way down the rows upon rows of Heart Pine, Douglas Fir and the occasional pieces of luxurious Redwood. Peter provided as a guided tour of the facilities along with a short history lesson on both the facility and the logging industry in the U.S.

What may be even more impressive than the size and volume of these timbers are the stories of their origin. Although the lumbering industry had been booming in the U.S. for well over a century, many of the timbers reclaimed today come from buildings constructed during WWII. The abundance of wood and the need for steel for the war effort made timbers an invaluable resource in the construction of military, government and civilian buildings alike. Amazingly, Peter has a catalog of all the timbers on-site and can tell you a little bit about almost any piece of wood you may take a liking too. These little pieces of knowledge make the idea of having one of these timbers as a key feature in our home all that much more exciting.

Our Timber will most likely be a piece of 3 or 4″ thick, 20 foot long piece of Douglas Fir coming from a building in California. However the final piece won’t be selected until Peter and Matt have a chance to talk in more detail about our project. From there Peter will select out just the right piece to be cut down to reveal the wonderful unexposed grain of this historic piece of wood. Ultimately we look forward to having a little piece of the “Industrial Forest” as key element in our home for the next 100 years or so.

A beautiful Timber table built by Eastvold Custom Woodworks.

The Duluth Timber Company’s sign.

Timber expert Peter Krieger gives us a history lesson on
reclaimed timbers.

Giant timbers like these line the drive to the Duluth
Timber Company.

The huge saw used to trim down the timbers can take pieces
of wood in excess of 40 feet long.

4″ thick pieces of finished timbers ready for delivery.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 9:29 pm and is filed under Architecture, Green, Main, building. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.