Catching Up: How Much Wood Can a Woodchuck Chuck?

Now, I am not a woodchuck, but man, have we been chucking the wood. Yes it has been a loooooog time since I posted on the blog, not because I have not wanted to, but because I have not had much down time and had so much going on at one time.

So this is what’s been going on with me:

It’s still hard for me to grasp that you just cannot make more wood when you want to. In a machine company, when orders are up, you just put more together, but when wood orders are up, you still have to wait to get it right. The yard is not helping us this year—it’s been rain and more rain on the wood. So it takes longer to dry it out, then place it in the pre-dryer, then off to the kilns. All the while, the wood buyers are doing all they can to get more wood for future orders. Don’t think I want to be a lumberjack right now!

We had a great group of people at the NWFA school we taught in Georgia in May.Training classes with the NWFA are even hard to fit in this year. I think I have only made a few so far; that has got to change … man, those are the highlight of the year for me! Being a part of the training is a blast, but a lot more work than one would think. My hat is off to the NWFA for the outstanding programs they have going this year. You need to look at the classes they offer this year; it’s simple to do: www.nwfa.org.

The biggest pain—and I won’t hold back here—is builders still installing wood without HVAC. I cannot tell you how many jobs we are called out to look at because the floor is failing. You name the problem and we have seen it. The problem is the builders are so cheap that they are not willing to pay for a good floor person to do the job, and they rush every part of the job to just get it done. We talk to all the trades, and they push them like they push the floors. If I had $1 for every time I said, “Get the house ready for wood and then get the wood ready for the house,” I could pay cash for a trip to any Island vacation. This is going to step on a few more toes, but it is true in this market. More than I care to count, the crews on many jobs cannot speak English. I speak two—English and redneck—but that is not going to help me on those jobs. When people can’t communicate with each other, things just go bad. Again, the builders are the ones I blame; their lowest-price, get-it-in attitude is killing the market. The contractor is stuck in the middle, if you’re doing the job by the builder’s standard, it is going to fail and bite you; if you don’t; you’re out of work.

Let me keep on stepping on toes and bring up another topic: factory finish floors that are bulletproof … they are not! We get calls to job sites where the sales guy told the builder to buy this because it does not need time on the job before install or HVAC. “It won’t matter with this—it’s engineered!” Oh boy, is that a lie. Glue-down or nail-down, it’s wood, and wood will move.

I have great concern with glue-down jobs on wood subfloors. Do we know a perm on the glue? If it stops the moisture from getting to the wood, then where is it stopping? That is right, the subfloor. Snap-together flooring that has a closed-cell foam, where is that stopping the moisture? Well, sorry if you did not have on steel-toe boots, but this is what we face. This is getting long, so more on these topics in my next post…