A few years ago one of my neighbours came to me for a price on a cutting list for a set of windows. As a European oak specialist I naturally quoted to supply air-dried QB1 grade oak.
After he had cleaned up the tea he had spat all over his desk, he explained that he had been quoted a quarter of our price for spruce. He went ahead and asked his joiner to make the windows in spruce.
He contacted me again recently, asking for a price on a similar list. Being nosey I pushed for more info – the spruce windows have rotted out and need to be replaced; he wants a durable timber now.
It is easy to blame the joiner here, but is it fair? Most joiners have years of experience and where things go wrong it is often because the client is pushing for ever lower prices.
This joiner should have used treated timber, but given the relentless pressure for cheap work, can you blame him? I would be prepared to bet he offered my neighbour the choice and he went for the cheapest.
Was this joinery fit for purpose? To my way of thinking the answer is an emphatic “no”. Oak joinery can be expected to last for decades, even hundreds of years if it is well looked after. Five years for a set of windows is not acceptable.
So why did my neighbour make this choice? I have always assumed that the oak in a finished job will represent about a third of the final invoice, so he achieved a saving of about 25% on the finished job.
He now sees this as a false economy. It never occurred to him that his preferences would compromise his windows to this degree, and he works in IT, so why should it? The real question is, why did he think he knows better than the joiner, or are joiners so ground down by these people that they don’t point out the errors in their logic?
The wrong materials are being specified all the time. Many architects specify kiln dried for external joinery! Why? Everybody knows if you use wet timber it will shrink as it dries whereas dry timber will swell if it picks up moisture. So why specify a material that is not suitable, when this will inevitably mean the finished windows will not be fit for purpose?
Again, it boils down to money and a short-term attitude towards it.
Many sawmills have done away with air drying stock as modern kilns can dry it from green. This means the vast stockpiles of slowly drying timber can be avoided and the cost of the KD board is dramatically lower. But it is wracked with tension, which used to be relieved in the air drying process, and it is too dry for external joinery.
And customers/specifiers are being told this is all that is available. This is not true.
The joinery industry is more than capable of turning out high quality, accurate and good value products, so why are they being forced to use materials which undermine the integrity of their work, when the savings achieved are irrelevant when compared to the cost of a premature replacement or remedial work?
