old west barn

Green and Environmental
Standards

Now that the green building movement has taken off, our business has found new markets. Our company was "green" before it became the latest popular term. We did not invent a product to be part of the green movement after it took off. We had been doing the right thing all long by building energy efficient, sustainable homes and reusing materials. The original purpose to build doors from barn boards was not necessarily to be part of the green building movement, but rather, the wood was so beautiful that we loved the results.

Our feeling is that one should not have to give up good taste, quality, value, or a rich look to build with green products. You can have both beauty and feel good about the environment when you purchase millwork made by Reclaimed Lumber Products. We also believe that the key ingredient to building responsible and sustainable is to use quality, timeless materials that will not wear out or go out of style. If you utilize authentic solid materials and quality construction your project will maintain a sense of classic elegance Also when you order the real thing from us there is no need for faux distress which cannot match the honest and original product that we provide. You can feel content about your purchase when you order custom millwork from us that is made especially for you.

Fortunately, Reclaimed Lumber Product's custom doors, wood flooring, and millwork match well with green architecture. Since our doors are made entirely from recycled content they contribute to LEED points such as recycled content and low VOC product. Whether you are building under the USGBC or the NAHB program, we can make green building materials to suit your project.

Here is a highlight of some of our key environmentally conscious decisions.

  • You can choose to have our stile and rail doors entirely made from recycled content, except for eight ½ x5” dowels and the glue.
  • Our main glue that we use for assembly is water based cross-link PVA. The brand is ROO Superbond. It is NAUF and VOC free upon curing. We do use a little polyurethane glue in the dowel holes only. The rest of the door is natural reclaimed lumber. The doors are sent with no finish.
  • Our engineered flooring is made with a 6mm wear layer of recycled wood and the backer is 12mm FSC Pure certified birch plywood. The plywood is Carb 2 compliant.
  • One of the reasons we created such a diverse product line was to better utilize our raw materials. We increase our yield and lowered our waste factor.  We have invented product lines that can utilize product that would previously been waste.  Now our only waste is chips and chunks shorter than a foot long.
  • Just a side note on shipping- We’ve had green customers concerned about shipping. It costs us more to ship to a neighboring town 100 miles away than across the country. Diesel fuel drives the cost of shipping. In my opinion, shipping on a common carrier uses less diesel than some people requesting special delivery locally.
  • Our Nampa shop is on a rural acreage with well and septic. The only use of water is a restroom for employees and occasionally cleaning outside equipment and boards with pressure washer. Our shop is a very small footprint for the amount of sales and product that we produce. Our conditioned space is only 2800 square feet. We cool w/ fans sucking in outside air at night in the summer. Our machinery and dust collection equipment generate enough heat that we only have to turn on the heat about 3 months out of the year. In our growth plan at a new facility that we built in Emmett, we will have a boiler that burns our waste wood to heat our shop; currently all the waste goes through grinder into the dust collection bin. This sawdust is recycled for animal bedding and nurseries.
  • When we built our new facility in Emmett, we utilized our own recycled building materials.  So the shop is clad with reclaimed oak siding and old, rusty corrugated roofing metal.   One of our most interesting designs is a structure that utilized repurposed shipping containers as the walls and storage for a large shed.
  • Most of our machinery runs on 3 phase power which is more efficient than standard single phase service. We have also benefited in smart energy efficiency design such as utilizing LED lighting and Variable Frequency Drives to match power consumption and demand by the motors. Another interesting element that have noticed works is matching the size of the machinery with the task at hand such as utilizing two to three smaller air compressors to meet our whole shop demand where only one of them needs to run occasionally instead of one big one running all the time.

Wood is one of the most rapidly renewable building materials there is. So many of

barn dismantling and recycling salvage

the alternative floor coverings and doors are no longer made with natural materials. We love the thought of you choosing our wood floor over vinyl or a solid wood door over fiberglass. Surprisingly you won’t hear us making disparaging remarks about materials made with virgin wood materials. We still support a conscientious logging industry and believe there is room in the marketplace for both our recycled wood products and ones made from virgin materials. Usually our product made from reclaimed materials will always cost more than a similar product made from virgin materials because of the difficult labor that goes into handling the old reclaimed boards. Sometimes we surprise our customers by telling them that they need to appreciate our product for more reasons than just the fact that it was made from recycled content. They need to also appreciate the beauty and quality.