If you’re an avid Grand Designs fan, you’ve probably seen the work of Carpenter Oak and Carpenter Oak & Woodland, who built the Argyll timber-framed house. I met Carpenter Oak at Grand Designs Live, and was delighted to later discover that their sister company, Carpenter Oak & Woodland (yes, I know it’s confusing!) have a blog. Although it is updated only sporadically, it’s worth taking a look through the archives as there’s some very interesting stuff hidden away there. Andy Parker points out that oak isn’t the only timber and gets cross at Martin Clarke of British Precast (whose job it is to promote concrete) for calling for a moratorium on timber use in multi-storey developments because of one fire. Tim Burrell talks about how no one seems to know what ‘environmentally responsible’ means, writes a really interesting post dissecting the poor build quality of an oak frame house featured in an issue of Homebuilding and Renovating magazine, and explains what green oak is.

The quality of the writing is great, but I’d like to see a lot more of it! The blog hasn’t been updated since March, and it’d be great if we could get at least one blog post each week. I’d also like Tim and Andy to remember that not everyone reading their blog is an expert in timber framing – they need to explain their jargon as they use it, so that us novices can learn something as we go along. Unfortunately, their RSS feed provides only headlines, and the archive navigation is so difficult that I gave up trying to dig into their old posts via the website and just read the ones still in the RSS feed. With my social media consultant hat on, I’d suggest getting Wordpress installed and using that for all things bloggish.