News Archive

You’re looking to replace the windows and doors in your property, or looking at window and door options for your new build project, and need to decide between wood and uPVC. You know that uPVC is cheaper to purchase, so why should you choose to spend more money for timber frames?

THE BETTER ENVIROMENTAL CHOICE

Wood is widely accepted to be the most environmentally friendly building material. Not only is it carbon neutral, absorbing more CO2 from the atmosphere than it produces, it’s also fully recyclable and biodegradable.

All of our wood is renewable; responsibly sourced from FSC certified forests and adheres to Chain of Custody requirements.

AESTHETICS

Although a lot of work has been invested in improving the appearance of uPVC windows and doors, they still can’t imitate the appearance of wood. A lot of this comes down to subtle design details and traditional features such as the joints, integral horns and the width of the glazing bars.

Wood also offers more opportunity for personalisation of appearance, from the style of the wood features, to the variety of colour finishes and the choice of fittings and fixtures. These are all important considerations for period properties, or new builds and extensions in conservation areas where more styling conditions are likely to be placed on the project by local authorit

As a nation that benefits from internet shopping and high street shops that are open seven days a week, we’re used to being able to buy what we want when we want it. So clients who have not purchased bespoke joinery before are often disappointed when encountering lead times between 12 – 16 weeks. Because of this, we thought it might help if we discussed some of the reasons behind these lead times.

DEMAND vs SKILLS

The demand for bespoke joinery products is seeing a big increase across the UK as people begin to recognise the benefits of wood based windows and doors over generic UPVC products. While this is a great boost for the industry it means that the skilled craftsmen able to produce these products are frequently being overtaken by high demand.

What are we doing to address this? For the industry as a whole to keep up with demand, we need more young people entering into the woodworking industries and individual companies need to encourage this and invest in the workers of the future. At the moment we have two first year woodworking apprentices that we hope will stay on with us long term once they are qualified. We want to find more local apprentices to invest in but this means generating more interest and getting more young people into training. With that in mind we have contacted local schools and hope to attend local careers conferences to help more young people learn

Spring is on the way, or so we're told, and after the wet winter weather we've had it's finally time we all looked forward to the brighter, longer days ahead. For us, that means our fitting team will be busy, busy, busy doing all those jobs that can't be done in the rain and the workshop team will be beavering away to keep up with them. Here in the office we'll be working on some exciting new developments for Thomas Joinery Ltd in the coming year so we're taking the chance now to carry out some early spring cleaning on the website.

We've added a dedicated Vacancies page and information about work experience and apprenticeships. We're also in the process of overhauling our Environment page, and over the next week we'll be adding details of some more recent projects and pictures.

We'll also be getting an up to date photo of the whole team for the website, but please don't tell them or they'll be hiding in the wood store and we'll never get them out.