Tag Archives: timber

Wooden Bridges and Walkways

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Wooden Decks Durban and Cape Town

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Wooden bridges and walkways are popular in gardens that have small streams or where the garden necessitates a walkway in order to get from one place to another.

Instead of allowing a path to form from wear on the grass you can install a 1m or so wide walkway which is level and flat allowing you to move from one side to the other in comfort. They are often complimented by stairs or the occasional step up or down where the ground falls. They are often used to join one deck to another or a doorway to a deck.

Bridges can be spanned quite far without using supporting posts if balau is used. If posts are needed to support the bridge midway then H5 CCA treated posts can be used which can live in water for up to 30 years.

Please complete the form below if you require a quote and I will contact you or you can call on 082 496 5444.

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Wooden Pergolas

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Wooden Decks Durban and Cape Town

Deck and pergola

A wooden pergola is a structure above that is designed using timber beams, purlins and slats. It is largely decorative as it does not prevent rain and provides limited shade depending on how many slats are installed.

They are sometimes referred to as Sun Screens and can be built in such a way as to offer shade at certain times of the day by adding more or less slats to the top. There are a multitude of designs and they are only limited by ones imagination, and of course budget.

They can be attached to the main building and then supported by posts on the front edge or they can be free-standing with posts to ground. One can install roof sheeting above to keep the rain out, but often it is better to consider an aluminium awning for this application due to cost. A balau pergola is not the cheapest method, but does add a nice appealing underside to your covering.

Wooden pergolas can also be installed using thatching laths to give them a more rustic look and feel.

Should you require a quote on a pergola or any other timber construction for your home, please call us on 082 496 5444 or use the form below.

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Wooden Screens and In Fills

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Wooden screens Durban and Cape Town

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Screens can be used for a multitude of purposes from screening out the view of the neighbours to enclosing an air conditioner so that it is not visible. They are sometimes concreted into the ground and can vary in height. Sometimes they are attached to boundary walls or the main building and some contain gates and hinged or removable lids for access to air conditioners, pool pumps, koi pond pumps and so on.

In fills are similar to screens but are normally installed between two brick columns on a boundary wall to create the effect of brick work and timber.

Most often the slats are installed horizontally with a 20mm gap between boards. This allows you to still be able to see through but screens out the view of others on the outside. This gap can however be changed for different applications. Double sided screens are also available so that both the inside and outside look the same.

To request a quote or for some advice please contact us on 082 496 5444 or use the form below to contact us.

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Wooden Sun Decks Durban and Cape Town

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Wooden decks Durban and Cape Town

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A wooden sundeck is a valuable extension to your house in that it is relatively cost-effective whilst still increasing the living area and total coverage of your property. If properly installed and maintained it will give you many years of warmth and enjoyment and you will retain the value of it when ultimately selling your property. It is more cost-effective than brick, concrete or steel and with the trend moving towards sustainable and green building, a sun deck, sourced from sustainable forestry will retain its value for many years to come.

We generally use CCA treated pine in our substructures as it is a lot more cost-effective than using balau and we are still able to offer a 50 year supplier guarantee on the timber used in the substructure. This is provided we document the build with photos, retention records from the treatment plant, the date and invoices of when we bought the timber etc. As a rule we build in accordance with their criteria for the guarantee, but if a guarantee is required, we must be notified beforehand so that we can obtain these documents during our build. We use balau deck boards on the surface of the deck because they are infinitely more stable and do not warp or twist as much as balau. This is not as important in the substructure because it is largely covered from the sun and the pieces we use are a lot thicker so don’t warp or twist as much. Deck boards on the other hand take the full brunt of the sun and tend to warp more quickly. Also we source our balau at very competitive prices and can therefore build a deck at very competitive prices, even compared to using pine deck boards. Pine deck boards are much softer so one has to use twice as much wood negating the cost saving by using a cheaper timber. The structural pieces in balau are more expensive per cubic metre than pine so using a CCA treated substructure reduces the cost which we pass on to the client.

We use kalgard screws which are guaranteed by the supplier against rust for 25 years, we counter sink them and close the holes using an epoxy and saw dust mixture to match the colour, thus eliminating water ingression through the screw holes thereby reducing rot at the screw hole. They are sanded flat and we seal our decks using an oil based sealer which penetrates the timber rather than leaving a coating or film on the surface. Maintenance is therefore easy and inexpensive. You simply wipe clean the timber, clean any greasy marks off with turps and re-apply using brush, sponge, cloth or spray.

For some expert advice or a quote, please contact us on 082 496 5444 or complete the contact us form below.

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Solid Wooden Flooring Installers Durban and Cape Town

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Solid wood flooring installer Durban and Cape town

There are two ways one can install a solid wooden floor. One is to apply the boards directly to the concrete substructure using adhesive and the other is to suspend the floor with joists or batons. This is sometimes referred to as a sprung or suspended floor.

In the first method it is imperative that the substrate is completely flat. If the floor is not completely flat, the boards will lift because they will go down under stress and over time will pull themselves up. If the floor is not completely flat you MUST screed it and get it flat. Or you can opt to install a sprung floor. However installing a sprung floor will result in the surface being about 50mm higher than it was or 30mm higher than the other method. Reason being is that there will be a baton underneath the boards to accept the floor board. So double-check where your floor will end up before choosing the method.

I will go into more detail about each method in two separate articles which you can search for in the search bar on the right, but for the purposes of this article I will just touch on the types of timber one can choose and a broad outline of solid wood flooring.

There are various types of timber that can be used for solid wood flooring. Each one comes with its own characteristics and properties. Some are harder than others, some are less prone to marking because they are dark coloured. What I find most important is to choose a timber that will not move much after installation. All timber will move as it expands and contracts due to fluctuations in temperature, moisture in the atmosphere and other factors. These will all vary with the seasons and in different parts of the country the variation will be different. It is always a good idea to bring the timber to site where it will finally be laid and let it acclimatise for a few weeks before installing. If the timber for instance was kiln dried and then stored in Durban on the coast, then later moved to Gauteng it will move because of differing temperatures and moisture in the atmosphere. So it should be allowed to rest for a few weeks before installing. In fact it should be allowed to rest before machining so that any movement can be removed through the machining process resulting in a flat, square, stable board. There is nothing more frustrating than laying solid wood floor boards only to find that later they have cupped or bowed slightly and unsightly gaps appear between boards or worse still they start to lift. It is not always possible to let them rest before machining but at least allow them to rest before installing so that any movement can be seen before installation and corrected where possible.

One can try to match the colour of the timber to the rest of the room. Saligna for instance is slightly pinkish in colour whereas teak will be a much darker wood and sometimes with dark heartwood and lighter coloured sapwood. You can get creative in matching the colours and interspersed dark with light. If you feel like get really clever you can use different types of wood in your floor but be careful to try to match the timber in their density so that all the pieces will expand and contract at a similar rate.

Your floor should be finished with a good quality polyurethane either in mineral based or water based. Water based is normally preferred as it allows you to apply several coats in the same day. Also it is better for our environment.

For a free no obligation quote or advice on your solid wood flooring please complete the form below or you can contact us on 082 496 5444.

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Wooden Fencing in Durban

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Wooden fencing can come in many different designs and they are limited only by ones imagination.  All our timber is sourced from companies who adhere to renewable forestry practices.  There are a few designs or types of wooden fencing that we install mentioned below.  However we can custom design wooden fences for you using best building practices and aesthetically pleasing ideas.

POST AND RAIL FENCING

Post and Rail Fencing Durban

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Post and Rail Fencing is quite common and often found in areas where horses are kept. It has become more popular in recent times in suburban areas where some sort of fence needs to be in place without obscuring the view. They don’t provide much boundary protection as they are not that high, and therefore are more popular where the fence doesn’t need to protect the boundary.
They can be covered with weldmesh to provide more of a barrier. On their own they have large openings that people and small animals can climb through but they prevent larger animals from moving through such as horses. They are often installed in gardens of secure estates where the main purpose is not to keep people out. They come in various heights from 900mm to 1.8m.

The posts and rails are normally all H4 CCA Treated so are able to live in the ground in constant contact with wet soil without rotting for up to 30 years. The best timber to use here is pine sourced from the Cape as they have fewer tendencies to split. Because the post or rail is machined from a single log, they are naturally more prone to splitting, but if sourced from the Cape, then the splitting is limited.

Picket Fencing Durban

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PICKET FENCING

Picket fencing is a natural alternative to other materials that can be used to provide a barrier at boundaries of properties to keep both humans and small animals in or out. They can be installed as a solid fence (i.e. no gaps between pickets) or they can be installed with a slat’s width between pickets.

The pickets are normally 22mm x 72mm and are installed using gum poles set every 2m or so with rails on top and bottom to which the pickets are attached. The tops can be square or they can be shaped into sharp pickets. Again these wooden fences can vary in height limited only by the length of slats available.

The gum poles are normally H4 CCA treated gum and the slats and rails are normally H3 CCA treated pine. Hence they can last for 30 to 50 years without rotting.

DROPPER FENCING

This type of wooden fencing is similar to picket fencing in that it is installed using gum poles of H4 CCA Treated Gum, rails and pickets, or droppers. The main difference being of course that this fence is made entirely from round poles and not machined timber. All of it is gum so they are a bit stronger and the chance of a dropper splitting is less than the chance of a slat breaking.

Again the tops of each dropper can be left square or they can be machined to spikes, thus providing some security for would be intruders and also varying the visual appeal of them.

WELD MESH

Weldmesh fencing Durban

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A weldmesh fence is one of the cheapest form of fencing. It is installed using gum poles and stays on either end with intermediate posts every 2m or so. The height can vary depending on your requirements. Straining wire is then pulled taut between the main posts and weldmesh is bound on to that. Various heights are available and various grades of weld mesh are available. The actual wire that the weld mesh is made from varies in gauge and the rectangles that this wire forms can vary in length and width. All poles used are H4 CCA treated gum poles.

For a free no obligation quote on your wooden fencing requirements please give us a call on 082 496 5444 or use the contact us form below.

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Outdoor Garden Furniture – Picnic Tables

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Outdoor furniture - picnic tables

Click to enlarge – pictured is an example of a table in the 40 x 140 range

Outdoor Garden Furniture such as picnic tables comes in a variety of shapes and sizes. There is the climb in models or the walk in models. Some have backrests and some don’t. Some are 4 seaters, some are 10 seaters and some are round or octagonal. The choice of design is endless really and limited only by your imagination. A garden, in my opinion, is incomplete without one and many a day will be spent utilising this very cost-effective, yet versatile piece of Outdoor Garden Furniture called a picnic table.

They can be made from a variety of timber but we have found CCA treated Pine to be the most cost-effective. Provided the timber is treated to at least an H3 level, the picnic table will last many years in the rain and sun. H2 is what is normally available from your timber yard because they are supplying largely the roofing industry, but H2 is not treated enough and will rot. H3 is your normal decking material and is suitable to remain outdoors exposed to the elements. We can however make them out of whatever timber you require, but some timbers do become cost prohibitive, unless you are working to a uncapped budget.

Outdoor furniture - picnic tables

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Our biggest sellers are the walk in design with or without backrest. The walk in allows you to slide along the chair without having to climb over the seat to get your feet in. The walk in does however take up a bit more space than the climb in but are, in my opinion, more comfortable and is what you normally find in most pubs around South Africa. The walk in with backrest takes up considerably more space than the ones without the backrest, but does allow you to lean back of course. They also need to be accessed from either side instead of climbing over the seat. They can be made with an attached bench, the most popular, or with a detached bench. The ones with detached benches are sometimes used indoors too as breakfast tables. In this instance one might want to consider using a timber other than pine to give it a cleaner and more appealing look than pine.

Our picnic tables are generally made from stock that is 30mm thick and 100mm wide although this can vary from 23mm thick to 110 wide depending on how much machining needs to be done to get the wood to planned on all four sides.

Screw holes are covered using clear epoxy mixed with saw dust to match the colour and they are then sealed in a choice of tint using a good quality timber preservative. Timber preservative keeps maintenance to a minimum as there is no sanding that is required. When it comes to time to re-seal simply clean and apply 2 or 3 more coats. Applying varnish type coatings will result in the coating peeling and flaking over time and all of it will need to be sanded off which is near impossible.

Kiddies picnic table

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Again we do not produce these tables in flat pack as they simply won’t last. They are pre manufactured in our factory and then transported to site.

A similar design is also available in a kiddies size and can be painted in bright colours rather than a wood stain effect.

For a free no obligation quote, please complete the form below or call us on 082 496 5444.

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Stainless Steel Wire Rope Balustrades, Durban

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Below is an article on wire rope balustrades to refresh the methods of installing them, display some pictures and highlight some pros and cons of this type of balustrade.

Wire rope balustrades are normally installed when one wants to avoid limiting the view as much as possible whilst still providing a barrier at the end of a deck. As opposed to solid timber balustrades which obstruct the view when in a seated position. A wire rope balustrade limits this as the cables are only 4mm thick.

On a standard 1m high compliant balustrade one would use 8 strands resulting in 9 gaps of 107mm each after taking into account that the capping is 30mm thick. Although the wire rope is tensioned on either end it is not tensioned to guitar string tension and can therefore be pulled open to create a bigger opening than 107mm. Care should therefore be taken when installing these wire rope balustrades if the property owner has small kids. They are not the safest and the height of the deck off the ground should be taken into account when choosing this style of balustrade.

As mentioned above the wire rope has a 4mm diameter. It consists of 19 smaller strands making up one larger strand (1 x19). The other type of wire rope is a 5mm wire rope. This is a 7 x 19. So it has 7 x 19 strands that make one 5mm strand. At The Wood Joint we use only the 4mm (1 x 19) wire rope as this is marine grade stainless steel and won’t tarnish as easily as the 5mm wire rope.

The 4mm rope doesn’t bend as easily as the 5mm rope so it cannot be used in conjunction with turn buckles where the rope needs to bend around the buckle 180º. Instead we make use of a swage and button head system where the wire rope is crimped into a swage on one end and a button head, which is sunk into the timber upright, on the other end. They are much neater than turn buckles but it does result in terminating the strands at a 90º corner and starting a new strand for the next run. As such, posts need to be doubled up so that a new button head can be installed where a swage terminates on the previous run. The end result is a slightly more expensive balustrade but one that won’t tarnish as easily and one that has a much neater appearance.

Care must be taken to cut the wire rope at the right length so as to have enough rope to insert it into the swage but not too much so that it can’t be tensioned properly. Once it is cut and crimped it can’t be re-cut or “uncrimped”.

The swage and button heads should be crimped towards the beginning and crimped twice to avoid failure later on. They can be finished off neatly with a stainless steel dome nut.

We are both suppliers and installers of wire rope balustrades. We own a crimping tool designed for 4mm wire rope which is also available for hire. Call us on 082 496 5444 or use the contact us form below for pricing and availability.

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Balau Duck Boards for Wooden Decks – Durban

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Balau pot plant bases Durban

Balau pot plant bases for wooden decks

I have inspected many a wooden deck in Durban where the deck boards beneath a pot plant have started rotting. As can be imagined, rain water and water from watering the pot plant gets trapped below the pot plant and takes much longer to dissipate or evaporate than water collecting elsewhere on the surface of the wooden deck. This of course causes rot to accelerate below the pot plant resulting in premature and costly maintenance.

It can be easily prevented by placing something below the pot plant that is slightly raised off the deck surface and makes less contact with the deck itself. Water can then evaporate or run off more quickly which will slow the rotting process down. All wood will eventually rot and even though balau is more resistant to rot than other species of timber it is not immune to rot. The pot plant base can be moved periodically so that the water trapped between the pot plant base and the deck can also evaporate.

We manufacture pot plant bases in various sizes from balau deck boards that make as little contact with the deck surface as possible and are both pleasing to the eye and effective in resisting rot. They are inexpensive. At the time of writing this article (8 May 2016). they were retailing for approximately R150-00 each, depending on the size. They can be custom-made to fit the pot plant base and will save you a fair amount of money in future maintenance.

These pot plant bases are a joint venture between The Wood Joint and the staff. The builders make them in their spare time and the company recovers a bit for scrap off cuts. We split the proceeds equally.

You can contact us on 082 496 5444 or use the contact us form below. Please provide the size of pot plant base required or the size of the your pot plant so we can work out what will work best.

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Indoor Wooden Balau Pool Deck Built in Estcourt

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Here’s an indoor wooden balau pool deck we built in Estcourt KZN recently.  The client had been doing some renovations on his house and had enclosed the pool with brick walls and windows resulting in an indoor pool.  He wanted a wooden deck around it to finish it off nicely.

Careful consideration was needed to ensure that any water from the pool could quickly drain away so as not to remain wet beneath the deck boards for too long.  Of course with an outdoor deck any rain water or pool water evaporates quite quickly and isn’t of that much concern.  Being indoors however this water can get trapped below the deck for some time resulting in premature failure of the timber.  Although the timber is H3 CCA treated, and as such can live outdoors with periodic wetting, it cannot remain wet constantly.  H4 CCA Treated timber is more suitable for damp conditions such as constant contact with wet soil.  But a fair amount of water on an ongoing basis is not a good idea.

In this instance the builder had done a great job in creating a small fall on all four sides of the pool so that any water dripping or splashing on the deck would fall back into the pool rather than sit below the deck.

The job was relatively easy as there was very little difference in distance between the walls and the sides of the pool.  If the wall is not parallel to the pool then it will result in a wedged shaped deck board either up against the wall or the pool.  To counter this one must “fan” the deck boards by making the gaps on one side 1mm smaller than the gaps on the other side effectively gaining 1mm per deck board.  After 20 deck boards you will gain 20mm to make up any difference.

In fibre glass pools one might also find that the edges of the pool are not straight.  Run a fish line along it to see if it bulges in or out and find the straightest side to start your decking.  If it does bulge then you will need to overlap your deck board on the pool side slightly to cover that and keep the deck boards straight.

A simple single deck board as a fascia board on the inside of the pool finished it off nicely.  It was oiled with a deck oil and this deck will require very little maintenance or re-oiling as it is indoors and won’t get any sun.

Call us on 082 496 5444 for a free quote on your decking requirements.  We also supply and install balustrades, pergolas, walkways, bridges, jacuzzi cladding and pool pump covers.

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