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Our Timber

The type of Tree we use

Northern Spruce & Northern Pine are two names given to the same type of tree. The tree is by far the largest and most important variety of all the coniferous, providing more resin, paper pulp and building timber than any other tree family. Evergreen and resinous, the spruce's thick and scaly bark provides a protective layer around the sapwood and heartwood interior.

Sapwood is the youngest part of the tree and is generally softer due to its conduction of water and fluids. Recognizable by its texture, it is lighter than the inner heartwood, is low in resin content and has very few knots. As the tree grows in diameter, the innermost layers of sapwood become heartwood and new sapwood is produced on the inside of the woody stem.

As a tree increases in age and diameter an inner portion of the sapwood becomes inactive and finally ceases to function, as the cells die. This inert or dead portion is called Heartwood. Its name derives solely from its position and not from any vital importance to the tree. Full of preservation fluids such as resin, the heartwood section is much harder in texture.

The type of Wood we use

We only use Heartwood from the Northern Scandinavian Spruce for our Log Cabins. The Northern Scandinavian Spruce provides the very best timber for this type of application. Northern Scandinavian Spruce is grown near the Arctic Circle where the extreme cold reduces growth rates and, this means the wood has a very tight grain and higher density than faster growing varieties.

We buy timber from several forests with different mills; this allows us to source the best quality timber; although we ensure that each cabin is made with wood from the same batch of logs from the same mill.

Our wood is inherently stable and does not give rise to the twisting or warping often associated with the inferior woods used in log cabin manufacture these days. In addition to sourcing quality wood, all of the timber we use is kiln dried to ensure dimensional stability. High quality wood is expensive. With a very cheap log cabin it is just not possible that it is manufactured from as high a quality of wood that we and many other suppliers would wish to use. It is a fact of life that if the price looks too good to be true then there is usually very good reason why it is so cheap!