Timber in the building industry
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Why choose timber?
Click here for a recent article that highlights exactly why! What's good about wood? Timber has been a building material of choice for New Zealand homes since the arrival of the first European settlers. Many nineteenth-century homes constructed in timber are still in use and habitable today. The timber industry is now a well-established industry sector, with the offsite manufacture of prefabricated timber wall frames dating back to around 1960, and roof trusses to around 1964. Timber-framed houses have been the norm since then, with probably 90 percent of standalone residential buildings constructed using timber framing. The benefits of timber are widely known, and the material is as popular as ever given today’s focus on sustainability and high performance eco-homes. When using timber it is very easy to meet the requirements of the New Zealand Building Code standards, as timber buildings designed and constructed using NZS3604:2011 automatically comply. There is no equivalent for concrete block or steel, resulting in a much more complicated and time-consuming design and consenting process for those materials. |
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Reasons to choose timber
Timber is fast and flexible; the builder’s choice
- Timber allows flexibility of design; modifications and tweaks to layout during the construction process become very easy to achieve
- Builders are familiar with timber and like using it; they understand how to get the best out of it
- Timber is our most sustainable raw material. It results in far fewer carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere than competing building products
- Timber is a proven thermal insulator
- Timber retains heat from the day and releases it at night
- Timber used appropriately, in accordance with building standards and regulations, will exceed the minimum 50-year service life for materials used for the structure of houses in New Zealand
- Timber treated with the appropriate level of preservative, and properly maintained, can last in service for 100 years or more
- Timber is a sustainably produced and naturally renewable material, with low energy consumption during production, and is known to have a low carbon footprint
- Timber absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere while other products emit CO2 into the atmosphere
- Timber used as your building material is PRACTICAL PROVEN PEERLESS