The Scent of the Lumber

I’m getting more comfortable with the smell of the exposed skeleton of the house.<br />n<br />nOver the years of living here, we’d do little things here and there, and a certain scent would be noticeable. It was kind of an old house smell, maybe some old paint smell mixed in. But it wasn’t a musty odor… just kind of an old smell, like when you start to expose things, be it bare wood, pulling off old pieces of baseboard and the like.<br />n<br />nWhen they gutted the place, the scent was really apparent. After a few days or weeks, the smell started to diminish, especially as they carted away a lot of the old wood.<br />n<br />nSome framing, using new lumber, is already being done, and that has a distinct smell to it too. Smells like the lumber department at Home Depot, or maybe fresh sawdust. There is also some shear wall being installed, using OSB board. That, too, has a distinct odor, especially as it’s being cut to size.<br />n<br />nOver the last few weeks, I hadn’t caught a whiff of the old smell, but this weekend, as it rained pretty steadily all day Saturday, and everything got a good dousing, the smell of the old began to be very noticeable again.<br />n<br />nI’ve always had the notion that my sense of smell is more acute than the average bear. I can sometimes pick up the scent of other people and even associate the scent with the person. Now I’m wondering if this old smell is the scent of our individual house, developed over the 55+ years it’s been existence. No way to really tell unless I had the chance to visit another house in the neighborhood that’s similarly exposed. If it, too, has the same kind of scent, then I’d attribute it next to our specific development, sort of a group of structures that are part of the same family, even maybe having their raw materials come from the same place, the same forest, the same grove, the same old growth redwood grove.<br />n<br />nYep, we’re seeing a bunch of old growth redwood used as building materials in this place. Absolutely irreplaceable.