Building with “Next-Generational Wood”

By Kathryn Reis

Building with “Next-Generational Wood”

Merging history with our living space

Imagine walking into your local food store and hearing an uproar of laughter. The jovial discussion dominating the store’s entrance reminds you of happy hour at a local pub. As you quizzically turn your head towards the sound, sure enough, you spy at least ten voluble men drinking draught beer while sitting around a long, rustic table. 

That was my eye-opening experience when I entered Lowes Foods for the first time on a Friday evening in Asheboro, North Carolina. Two surprising details caught my attention:

• A grocery store has its own Beer Garden? (My German side is slightly amused!)
• Look at that table! What a beauty! What’s it’s story? (My urban wood enthusiast side slips into detective mode.)

Fortunately, I didn’t have to waste any time learning the answers to my burning questions. 

• Yes, there is a Beer Den (we are indoors after all) that rotates local craft beers for customer testing. 
• Yes, that magnificent table has a story, which Lowes Foods proudly shares with all visitors using a rolling sign.
• 

The story began in Robeson County, not long after WWII. The Parker Family built a barn, like the pictured one, to store and dry tobacco leaves with a wood burning stove. Within the last 15 years, the barn was demolished and converted into this inviting Community Table on the west side of my adopted hometown.  

But guess what?! Asheboro is not the only town to have a Community Table featuring reclaimed wood! There are 81 Lowes Foods across North Carolina and South Carolina that have their own “table with a tale.” Lowes Foods provides the origin story for its Community Table concept at its website. 

This resourceful approach to building furniture also applies to our homes, businesses, and government buildings. Architects, woodworkers and construction teams can unlock their creativity and expose consumers to functional art when they reclaim wood from historical structures. Click here to view a sampling of cabins that were built almost entirely with wood reclaimed from farmsteads, factories, and snow fences.

Collaboration is necessary to elevate the use of non-traditional woods

As I write this article, I am reminded of the marketing slogan for Rubbermaid … “Don’t you wish everything was made like Rubbermaid?” If you are reading this article, I surmise you share my viewpoint … “Don’t you wish everything was made with USRW?”

Urban, salvaged, and reclaimed wood (USRW) are three non-traditional forms of building materials. Yet it is the business of the Urban Wood Network to make USRW a TRADITIONAL form of building material for our homes, offices, stores, furniture, artwork, etc. How will we – the UWN members – bridge the divide between non-traditional and traditional building materials for urban, salvaged, and reclaimed wood? By actively collaborating with people across multiple professions and within our local communities.

Our Network leaders voluntarily invest their time to promote the values of USWR. The Network leaders are exploring opportunities to share our membership’s collective knowledge, skills, and abilities with individuals outside the UWN community so that city/town leaders, arborists, sawyers, architects, construction workers, and homeowners understand the role urban, salvaged, and reclaimed wood can play in our built environments. 

The UWN Built Environment Toolkit specifically states that “next-gen collaboration” must occur among all of these stakeholders (page 4). If we are to succeed at bridging the non-traditional—traditional gap for USRW, we must:

• Retrain everyone who decides how elements of our built environment should be constructed AND everyone who decides how their property’s tree should be managed upon its eventual felling.
  • Education is key to shaping a new world view of how to value our urban and rural community trees.
• Sound the alarm bell to rally everyone to our planning table about how standing community trees can be repurposed 10, 20 and 30 years from now.
  • Localities across the U.S. are demonstrating how this can be done. The World Resources Institute showcases three examples in this January 2022 article. Yet constructing residential, municipal, and business structures with USRW is still a concept that few architects and builders are considering. We need to draw them into our educational and planning activities.
• Advertise our certification standards for USRW, to alleviate concerns about the quality, durability. and grading of wood originating from our rural and urban communities.
• Explore statutory needs at the local, state, and national levels to establish legal requirements for USRW adoption within the marketplace.
• Establish communication systems that let architects and builders know where locally sourced USRW exists … and create “wood banks” with staffs of sorters, sawyers, and administrators to facilitate the requested transactions.

I am not a woodworker or forester. I am certain there are additional needs to address when elevating the status of USRW as a reliable material for the constructions of our homes, offices, schools, business centers, parks, etc. Now is the time for all of us to roll up our sleeves and do the heavy lifting if we want more stories to infiltrate the surfaces within which we dwell. 

If you need any extra motivation to get to work, go to bed tonight with Shel Silverstein’s children’s book, The Giving Tree, narrated by the Dramatic StoryTime Theater. May it inspire you into action for our storied, cross-generational trees that still have so much to give every member of your community. And in 10 years from now, may a larger majority of us walk into a local business that advertises stories, not just commodities.