Mountain Man Mike sat at our kitchen table looking over the plans.

MMM: “We’re going to need 14 Glulams, fifteen OSB sheets, but I highly recommend five-eighths plywood for the roof.  I don’t like walking on OSB, and we’ll need eight 14-foot TJIs.”

ME: “Huh?  I did understand the word plywood.”

There are so many building material options today. There’s steel studs and plastic (PVC) boards. There’s also all manner of non-concretey things made with concrete, such as concrete roof slates, concrete shake shingles, and concrete siding as well as regular old -concrete stamped and colored to look like brick or stone.

Then there are materials made by grinding things up and gluing them back together, which has led to the term engineered building materials.  God gave us trees.  We engineered their carcasses into something else.

Plumbing – you won’t find this stuff in nature

Nowadays you can plumb to your heart’s content with materials that exist nowhere in nature.  These include polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and the vaguely threatening sounding Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene, which is usually described by its friendly sounding initials, A B and S.  And there’s that handy new plumbing material cross-linked polyethylene, or PEX, which has me puzzling how they get polyethylene to cross link, whatever cross linking is. 

Not everything new is better

If, for example, you live in a house built or remodeled between the mid-60s and the early 70s, it may have aluminum wiring instead of copper.

Aluminum was all the rage because it is cheaper and lighter weight than copper, and those big overhead powerlines are aluminum.  But, over time, it became apparent aluminum wiring of the time didn’t play well with connected devices such as outlets and switches, and had a nasty tendency to overheat and cause its surroundings to burst into flame.

Glulam (glued laminated timber)

Glulam is made up of a number of layers of dimensioned timber, such as 2 X 4s or 2 X 6s  glued together to make a much bigger beam. Glulam construction allows for wood to safely support weight over spans that are way beyond that of wood alone, and it’s not new.

In 1943, Howard Hughes used glulams that spanned 120 feet and reached seven stories above the floor of the hangers he built for the construction of his Spruce Goose airplane.

LVL (laminated veneer lumber)

Since LVL is made up of multiple layers of thin wood glued together it provides that extra strength and resistance to warping and bending that Glulam does. LVL just doesn’t look as pretty, so, in the case of This House, we used a lot of LVL, but it’s all covered up.

TJI (Trus Joist I-Joist)

TJI is a Weyerhaeuser trademarked product. Everything about a TJI is made up, with LVL type wood making up the top and bottom flanges (fancy word for the wider parts.) The middle “webbing” is oriented strand board. As with the other engineered woods we used, TJIs hold their shape and resist twisting and bending better than “real” wood, and, I was tickled to learn TJIs are infinitely lighter than the same size dimensioned lumber.

OSB (oriented strand board)

Oriented strand board are those crazed looking product you see sheathing walls and roofs in any new subdivision you drive through.

OSB is layered like plywood, but the layers are created by shredding the wood into short strips, which are sifted and aligned with other strips. I found it fascinating to think that the largest OSB production facilities can enough sheets in one day to cover about 23 acres.

The ancient history of plywood

I was pretty excited that I had at least heard the word plywood when we began planning the Final Phase. But my knowledge is not special. Plywood is everywhere. Even in this day of OSB and other more modern engineered house coverings, plywood is still used in most instances for the first layer of flooring called the subfloor

Traces of glued up sheets of wood, , have been found in Egyptian tombs.  And the Chinese were using glued up wood products in their furniture making at least a thousand years ago. 

The first major modern plywood in the U.S. is widely regarded to have been an exhibit at the 1905, Portland, Oregon World’s Fair

Two by four?

Of course wood is still being used as wood, particularly in framing houses, and even bigger buildings. I recently watched a huge three-story apartment complex go up, all framed with wood.