When you’re planning your next home project, consider the benefits of using oak in that project. Whether it’s an extension, a kitchen remodel, a new porch or even a whole new home, oak can offer qualities that other building materials don’t. Here are some top reasons for including oak in your home:

1. Appearance
   Oak is a distinctive and elegant material with a beautiful colour and gorgeous feel. The wood grain makes an attractive pattern with great texture. If you’re looking for a rustic feel to your project, oak does this very well, especially with exposed beams adding loads of character to your property.
2. Versatile
   This wood is used a great deal in building but also in items such as furniture and flooring. It is incredibly strong, rot resistant, decay resistant and impervious to fungal and pest attack. It needs hardly any maintenance whatsoever so makes for a perfect building material. For a bespoke Oak Porch, visit http://www.bespoaktimberframes.co.uk/portfolio_page/oak-porch/
3. Durable
   Surprisingly, there are more than 500 types of oak trees across the world, but all varieties share the common features of moisture-resistant, strength and durability. To give an idea of the strength of the wood, not many other types of timber are used as commonly as oak for support beams and foundations in buildings. It is the favoured wood for both carpenters and builders. Homes that were made form oak back in the 16th century are still standing after all that time. Often oak gets stronger as it ages.

Image credit

4. Sustainable
   Oak has been used for many purposes in the UK for centuries – it’s both highly available and has the above positive qualities. With so much use, it’s important to not contribute to world deforestation and choose renewable oak from sustainable sources like sustainably managed forests.
5. Environmentally Friendly
   Trees are so vital to our survival as through their lifetime they absorb CO2 and release oxygen into the atmosphere. They capture the carbon in the air and it gets trapped into their fibres over many, many years. Once the tree is chopped down and used to make a house or a piece of furniture, that carbon is trapped forever, thus removing it from the environment. Producing Green Oak also doesn’t require a massive amount of fossil fuel, little industrial processing and no chemical treatments that harm the environment. Some other materials like brick, concrete and even some other types of wood require chemicals, industrial processing and a great deal of fossil fuels to produce. Using Green Oak is therefore much kinder to the environment.