How can we utilize discarded timber salvaged from old houses?

Timber Reprocessing (Most Economically Viable)
If the timber itself is not rotten, especially the beams and columns of old houses (such as pine, elm, or even mahogany), it would be a waste to simply shred it.

Vintage Furniture Making:  Contemporary designers highly value "repurposing old wood." Old timber, after decades of natural air drying, has low moisture content and is extremely stable, resistant to cracking and deformation. After planing away the carbonized layer or old paint, the grain has a very textured appearance.

Interior Decoration and Landscaping: Carbonized old timber can be used to create artistic feature walls, ceiling beams, or fences and walkways in outdoor ecological gardens.

Engineering Dunnage: Hard old timber can be directly cut into packaging dunnage or logistics pallets required for large factory machinery (such as our textile shredder when it leaves the factory).

Intermediate Utilization: Physical Crushing and Recycling (The Most Practical Industrial Path)
If the timber is fragmented or contains a large number of nails and cement blocks, making it unsuitable for furniture, then crushing equipment is needed.

Engineered Wood Products (Particleboard/MDF): Use a wood shredder to break down the old timber, remove impurities such as nails, and press it with glue to create new environmentally friendly panels.

Biomass Fuel (Pelletizing): This is currently the most mainstream use. Waste wood is crushed into wood powder and pressed into biomass pellets. This fuel has a high calorific value and is a high-quality clean energy source to replace coal.

Paper Pulp Fiber: Some high-quality waste wood can be used in pulp mills as a supplementary source of fiber.

Ecological Utilization: Agriculture and Horticulture
For timber that is partially decayed and unsuitable for industrial processing:

Organic Mulch: After coarse crushing, it can be used as a covering layer for urban greening, helping to retain soil moisture, suppress weeds, and eventually naturally decompose into organic fertilizer.

Edible Mushroom Substrate: Certain types of wood (such as oak and fruit wood), after being crushed, make excellent culture media for growing shiitake mushrooms and wood ear mushrooms.

Oh, perhaps the timber is still very hard and can continue to be used...

Lead and creosote paint are big issues.
An acquaintance ran a salvaging building demolition business but it was not viable with labour costs in Canada.

Toxic gick would be my concern too.

We do occasionally score whole truck loads of wood salvaged from renovation jobs and if we're sure it's toxin-free we'll bring it home. Here's a load we got a week or so back.



There are enough rotten bits we're sure it's not been treated in any way so we were happy to accept it. But there are so many nails in it it has no real value for anything other than burning. We just saw it, split it if necessary, feed it to the rocket mass heater and sieve the ash later to remove any nails.

I also have these bits of old barrel staves that I need to finish turning into a fruit tray, if the dragons don't pinch it to go sledging with...