A Builder Looks Back

Forest and Bird, Issue 105, 1 August 1952, Page 11

A Builder Looks Back

By

B. JORNS

IN the life time of many present day builders, timber was so plentiful in this country that it was considered a virtue to export it. Thus we read that in the year 1888 over 43,000,000 feet of timber was .shipped away from New Zealand, over 30,000,000 feet of it being kauri. For the six years from 1888 to 1893 well over 220,000,000 feet went overseas. The additional amount that has left our shores in the 59 years that have elapsed since 1893 would all add up to a colossal total of irreplaceable timber lost to this country. • Such prodigality coupled with the reckless burning of valuable timber in the overhasty clearing of land could only have one result. Up to 40 or 50 years ago, a builder founded a house on rows of piles of the best heart timber, be it totara, silver pine or kauri, and close walled these piles with boards to the ground. The outer walls of the house, he covered with weatherboards or rusticating with liberal stopboards covering all the corners. Verandah and porch floors and steps were all of heart timber. All the inside of the walls and ceilings he closeboarded with rough and match lining, doors were heavy and solid with wide architraves and skirtings; ceiling heights were 10, 11, or 12 feet. .Since that time the steadily decreasing quantity and quality of timber available challenged the builders’ powers of adaptiveness, substitution and invention.

This challenge has on the whole been fairly well met, and now we find that the equivalent house has concrete foundation walls and piles, concrete verandah and porch floors and steps. Fibre cement sheets, asbestos sheets, rough cast, or brick veneer cover the out-

side walls or maybe even the walls themselves are of concrete blocks. On the inside walls and ceiling, plaster sheets and wallboards have full sway, and ceiling heights have been reduced to little over 8 feet. Doors are now a skeleton framework of pinus insignis covered with plywood, with a minimum of architraves and skirtings. Where once he put wide kauri sink tops and kauri wash tubs, he now chooses between stainless steel, terazzo or plastic for his kitchen sink, and either concrete wash tubs or straight out washing machine for the laundry. The 5 or 6ft. close-board fence that once surrounded every section he has replaced with one of concrete posts and wire and netting. No longer is he a builder of wooden bridges or culverts, reinforced concrete has pushed the few remaining ones almost into the historical relic class whose demolition the builder eagerly awaits as supply of valuable timber. When our builder is finally finished with this changing world, he will then have the alternative of taking his last ride in a fibrous plaster coffin. However this is a legitimate field that still stubbornly resists the substituter, for in spite of the fact that such plaster coffins fulfil every requirement, our annual dead take with them up to f of a million feet of first class timber to be buried in the ground or burned in the crematorium, enough to build almost 100 houses a year. Our conservation forests have been whittled down to well below the danger line, but still this waste and export goes on. Necessity is the mother of invention and man is an adaptable creature, but so far no one has invented any synthetic or plastic trees, or given us a prefabricated forest to put on our catchment areas or watershed hills.