Our shop is based in 250 acres of mixed coniferous forest in Northern California. In 2015 a devastating fire swept through the region, destroying 70,868 acres of land in the Sierra Nevada foothills. The forest is now scattered with dead, yet still standing, giants; among these are Black Oaks, Cedar, and Pine. 475 homes were lost in the fire, including the remarkable home of one of our team members. Paul had spent the last thirty years building his beautiful timber-framed cabin by hand. Many in the community left after the fire; Paul and his family, however, chose to stay. From the ashes emerged a new opportunity. The land needed to be reforested and actively managed to reduce the risk of future fires, the lumber needed to be felled and stacked quickly or else rot from the inside, and our friends and families needed homes.

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Harvesting our own lumber within close proximity to our shop creates for an unusually sustainable woodworking practice. Normally, lumber is procured through large, corporate logging companies that go deep into live forests, clear cut huge tracts of land and then use fuel guzzling semi-trucks to haul the logs many miles to a milling site. From the mill site, all the lumber produced then needs to be hauled again, this time to a distributor. From the distributor, another transfer is needed to stock local stores. At last, the trees make a final journey to the job site where the lumber is actually needed. Each transfer produces substantial emissions. That is why our method is significant. In a forest we love and wish to grow and thrive, we carefully select trees to fell and haul to our Woodmizer Mill to process ourselves. We've virtually cut out all transfer emissions, dramatically lowering our carbon footprint. Additionally, we are able to reduce the costs of producing large timbers, making what is considered a luxury style of building much more affordable.