Skirting board

[Millwright]

Hello.

A question I have is this. Is the timber for skirting boards in houses made say, 1960 and before, some kind of super quality wood?

If I go to wickes or any builders merchants and buy some redwood/whitewood skirting, it'll go banana shaped pretty quickly. So I'm thinking of going MDF to complete some work at home.

Do you know of any non bananarama skirting?

 

[Deleted member 174758]

Not really, but getting a merchant to supply properly sawn and kilned stock is getting ever more difficult butthen a lot of modern skirting I see is 18mm thick, or sometimes less, and that's asking for trouble. MDF has the (to me) great advantage of having no knots and painting out superbly. Ask and decorator.

 

[Gerrydelasel]

Old skirting was pitch pine which was more slow growing and had longer to cure on the steam boat over from Canada, so warped rather less than modern fast growing, fast harvested spruce!

 

[cwhaley]

^^^^ this, and that fact that it was put in properly using twisted plugs between the bricks. It would be held in place so firmly, for such a long time, that it dried out and kept shape.

 

[Deleted member 174758]

Old skirting was pitch pine which was more slow growing and had longer to cure on the steam boat over from Canada, so warped rather less than modern fast growing, fast harvested spruce!

Having been in the trade nearly 50 years I plain disagree. By the 1930s pitch pine had been replaced by parana pine, but its' main use was always for beams and rough flooring which are sawn NOT machine moulded - the high pitch content means that the pitch has a tendency to clog cutters, feeder wheels, etc in 4-siders used to produce detailed mouldings, so it really wasn't used for that very much in the UK trade. Instead where a moulding had to be struck the original best choice was often Quebec yellow pine (also called eastern white pine) which is milder (works better) and contains far less pitch - and it's this timber you find in a lot of Victorian buildings. After WWI first growth timber in general became far scarcer (the war used vast quantities of timber) so you began to see far more second growth European redwoods used in interior carpentry, a trend which has continued until the present day accellerating after WWII when the UK's balance of trade position was perilous. By the 1960s we began to see the use of cheaper European whitewoods in skirtings and architraves, but certainly when I started in 1970 we were still using a lot of redwoods for skirtings, predominently from Russia with whitewood being reserved on "cheap jobs".