Tim Burrell

Tim is Carpenter Oak & Woodland’s managing director. Tim has extensive experience of managing companies of all sizes, in many business sectors, including construction and building. Tim’s no-nonsense hands-on approach, coupled with his outstanding management experience and commercial acumen, make him the ideal complement to the craft-based skills of the rest of the team.

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• Design and Build
• UK Timber Supply
• The Longevity of Wood
• Why timber can twist
• Roman siege catapult for sale on eBay

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By Tim Burrell

Better late than never, I suppose, but being so busy I never quite got round to commenting on the CPD event organised by the Centre for Timber Engineering at Napier University. The theme was on the use of green timber in construction, a subject obviously close to my heart! I always find these events a mixed blessing – while it’s great to get updated and to hear from and meet some great people, invariably I end up coming away with a big ‘if only....’. In this case, I found myself lamenting the fact that we are great at producing forests of sitka spruce, but very little that we can easily use unprocessed in construction.

Anyway, it was great to see that so many of our projects were being featured and discussed, and that so many architects and engineers so obviously have faith in us not just to manufacture on time and on budget, but perhaps more gratifyingly that the message to get your specialist contractor involved in the design early on was so strongly expressed. I think in a time where so many are wanting to build in timber, but gravitate to the engineered forms (LVLs, glulams etc), the use of unprocessed green timber is so often much more appropriate – a more simple, ecologically sound, attractive, and yes cheaper option.

It’s no doubt that the number of enquiries we receive are markedly on the increase. Who knows – a few more buildings of the quality of the Loch Lomond HQ and the Aspire centre in Dumferline, and we could see a huge swing towards this most obvious of building methods.