How Natural Builders Use Urban Wood for High-Performance Homes

By Jean Lotus

Natural building practices and urban wood are a natural fit. Some natural builders say recovered wood outperforms big-box lumber and doesn’t drive up total project costs. 

A case-study example is Tim White, founder of Texas Healthy Homes and a national consultant experienced in hempcrete, straw bale, papercrete, and adobe. White is a big fan of using recovered wood for high-performance building projects.  

A member of Natural Building Alliance, White has used trees thinned from the wildland-urban interface and beetle-killed ponderosa pine from Colorado national forests for roof decking in various natural building projects. White’s team integrated rough-sawn lumber into his structures as a direct alternative to industrial sheet goods like plywood or OSB.

White said his goal as a natural builder is to build homes with natural, non petroleum-based materials to show, “you can build homes without drywall, paint, or caulk.”

Labor and Material Logistics

White reuses the trunks of dead trees on Texas building sites for decorative structural elements like porch supports. 

On projects in rural mountain Colorado, he relied on building roofs with engineered trusses, covered with rough-sawn, 1X6 boards sourced from local sawmills and beetle-kill thinning operations. White noted that working with these boards was preferable to handling standard 4×8 panels. 

Workers preferred the sawmill boards over manufactured goods. “We weren’t saying ‘Oh, my God, I don’t want to see another piece of sheet good,’” White said in an interview, noting that his team still had energy for other tasks at the end of the workday. He reported that crews were also “excited that they weren’t dealing with chemicals like formaldehyde.” 

Economic and Environmental Impact

White emphasised that sourcing wood locally instead of buying from a big-box store redirects material that might otherwise be sent to a chipper. He framed the use of small, local mills as an economic driver for rural and remote locations. 

“I always go for small mills to try to create local economic development,” White explained.

The transition to natural wood also reduced jobsite waste. Because the material was not treated with industrial glues or resins, any off-cuts became “a piece of firewood instead of trash,” White said. 

For White, the decision to use regional, unprocessed timber was aimed at removing toxins from the built environment.

“What it comes down to is a moral decision to use these materials,” he said. “But the total costs ended up comparable when we avoided using sheet goods for roof decking.”

Jean Lotus is Executive Director of the Fort Collins, CO-based  Natural Building Alliance