Reclaimed-timber glossary

Reclaimed timber

Structural wood salvaged from an existing building or structure for reuse, as opposed to newly milled lumber. Value comes from age, species, character, and — increasingly — documented provenance.

Provenance

The documented origin and ownership history of a piece. For reclaimed timber it means the source structure, custody chain, and record of who handled it and when.

Chain of custody

The unbroken, traceable record of a material from its source to its installed location. The stronger and more auditable the chain, the more a buyer or reviewer can rely on the claim.

Hand-hewn

Shaped by hand with a broadaxe or adze rather than sawn. Leaves characteristic scalloped facets; a common tell of earlier timber framing.

Sash saw / pit saw

A reciprocating (up-and-down) saw. Leaves straight, roughly parallel kerf marks — generally an indicator of earlier milling, before circular saws.

Circular saw marks

Arced kerf marks left by a circular blade, which came into wide use after the mid-1800s. Places an upper bound on age.

Rose-head nail

A hand-wrought nail with a faceted, hammered head — the earliest common nail type, useful for dating.

Cut nail

A machine-cut, rectangular-shank "square" nail, common through the 19th century — between hand-wrought and modern wire nails.

Sinker log

A log that sank during river drives and rested underwater for decades. Prized for dense, slow-grown old-growth character; a distinct reclaimed category.

Marriage marks

Matching numerals or symbols cut into mating timber-frame joints so a frame could be reassembled in the right order — early positional tagging by hand.

Log mark / stamp hammer

A registered owner's mark struck into a log's end grain during the river-drive era, recorded in a county book of marks — a public timber-provenance registry long before databases.

Board foot

A unit of lumber volume: 144 cubic inches (a 12"×12"×1" board). The common basis for tallying and pricing timber.

Old-growth

Wood from mature, slow-grown forest, typically denser and tighter-ringed than second-growth. Much reclaimed structural timber is old-growth by virtue of its age.

Patina

The surface color and character wood develops over decades of oxidation, use, and weathering. Genuine patina extends below the surface; sprayed-on "aging" does not.

Checking

The splits that develop along the grain as wood dries over time. A natural pattern that is difficult to fake convincingly.

Timber frame

A structure built from heavy squared timbers joined with mortise-and-tenon joinery and pegs, rather than dimensional lumber and nails. The source of much reclaimed structural stock.

Mortise and tenon

A joint where a projecting tenon fits into a cut mortise, usually pinned with a wooden peg — the defining joinery of timber framing.

Species attestation

A recorded statement of a timber's wood species. Species affects value, workability, and whether the "story" of an old structure is plausible.

Tamper-evident record

A record structured so any later change is detectable. Hewmark chains each event to the one before and signs it, so history can be added to but not quietly rewritten.

Append-only

A record you can add to but not edit or delete. Provenance events are append-only so custody history can be corrected forward, never erased.

Digital twin

A model of a structure built from field records — each timber mapped to its slot (wall, course, position) — used to guide teardown and reassembly and to persist as documentation.

Certificate of authenticity

A document asserting a piece is what it claims. Only as good as its specificity and verifiability; a lot-level, unverifiable version is little more than letterhead.

FSC chain-of-custody

Forest Stewardship Council certification of an operation through periodic audits, oriented to mills and suppliers. Different in cost and grain from per-member provenance certification.

MR credits (LEED)

The Materials & Resources credit category in LEED, where reused and salvaged content can contribute to a project's points, subject to documentation.

Verify page

The public page a certified timber's QR code opens, where every signature and the full custody chain are checked in the buyer's own browser — no login, no app.